'The Duke of Trefoil.'
'A nobleman!' Betty repeated. 'A duke, and a lace-mender, and five shillings a week!'
'The glass roofs of his hothouses and greenhouses would cover an acre of ground. His wife sits in a boudoir opening into a conservatory where it is summer all the year round; roses bloom and violets, and geraniums wreathe the walls, and palm trees are grouped around fountains. She eats ripe strawberries every day in the year if she chooses, and might, like Judah, "wash her feet in the blood of the grape," the fruit is so plenty, the while my lace-mender strains her eyes to get half-a-crown a week for his Grace. All that alley and its poor crowded lodgings belong to him.'
'I don't wonder she looks bitter, poor thing. Do you suppose she knows how her landlord lives?'
'I doubt if she does. She perhaps never heard of the house and gardens at Trefoil Park. But in her youth she was a servant in a good house in the country,—not so great a house,—and she knows something of the difference between the way the rich live and the poor. She is very bitter over the contrast, and I cannot much blame her!'
'Yet it is not just.'
'Which?' said Pitt, smiling.
'That feeling of the poor towards the rich.'
'Is it not? It has some justice. I was coming home one night last winter, late, and found my way obstructed by the crowd of arrivals to an entertainment given at a certain great house. The house stood a little back from the street, and carpeting was laid down for the softly shod feet to pass over. Of course there were gathered a small crowd of lookers-on, pressing as near as they were allowed to come; trying to catch, if they might, a gleam or a glitter from the glories they could not approach. I don't know if the contrast struck them, but it struck me; the contrast between those satin slippers treading the carpet, and the bare feet standing on the muddy stones; feet that had never known the touch of a carpet anywhere, nor of anything else either clean or soft.'
'But those contrasts must be, Mr. Dallas.'