"I am a Tuber," I said sadly. "Every bright morning I say I will go by bus, but when I reach the Tube station the draught sucks me in through the door, the man grabs me by the collar, throws me into the sink, lifts up the plug and down we go into the drain-pipe together. I think I have the brand of Tubal Cain on my brow. It is a kind of perpetual crease—"
"I too Tube," said Charles; "but I know many eminently respectable bus people as well. Especially bus-women. They ride about, they tell me, on the most fantastically labelled vehicles and are always seeing new suburbs swim into their ken, and gazing—
'Out over London with a wild surmise,
Silent upon a seat of No. 10,'
or whatever the bally thing may be. But I never join their rash adventures. I belong to a different milieu. I move in a sort of social underworld. Not that I can deny, of course, that there is a certain amount of overlapping."
"I overlapped twice to-day myself," I said, "and as the second one was knitting a jumper—"
"And then there are the Tram-ites," he went on. "I don't understand their world either. The tram, I am told, suddenly plunges with a loud roar like a walrus under the streets of Holborn and emerges on the Embankment. The hansom cabs were called the gondolas of London. The trams, I suppose, are the submarines. But they are not of my life. I do not mingle with them."
"I mingled with a tram once," I said. "I clasped it warmly by the rail as it was going by, but I missed the step with my foot. It spurned me rather badly. But kindly explain what you're driving at."
"All these classes," said Charles, "have their own friendships, their own jolts and jars, their own way of being bullied by conductors and thrown into the mud and squeezed into cages and arranged upon straps. But they have one great thing in common, distinct though they may be. They are all passengers, all takers of tickets. There is going to be a Bus Union, a Tube Union, and a Tram Union, and when necessary they will combine."
"Against what?"