THE DECADENT GUYS.
(A Colour-Study in Green Carnations.)
They were sitting close together in their characteristic attitudes; the knees slightly limp, and the arms hanging loosely by their sides; Lord Raggie Tattersall in the peculiar kind of portable chair he most affected; Fustian Flitters in a luxurious sort of handbarrow. The lemon-tinted November light of a back street in a London slum floated lovingly on their collapsed forms, and on the great mass of weary cabbage-stalks that lay dreaming themselves daintily to death in the gutter at their feet.
They were both dressed very much alike, in loosely-fitting, fantastically patched coats. Lord Raggie was wearing a straw hat, with the crown reticently suggested rather than expressed, which suited his complexion very well, emphasising, as it did, the white weariness of his smooth face, with the bright spot of red that had appeared on each cheek, and the vacant fretfulness of his hollow eyes; he held his head slightly on one side, and seemed very tired. Fustian Flitters had adopted the regulation chimney-pot hat, beautiful with the iridescent sheen of decay; he was taller, bulgier, and bulkier than his friend, and allowed his heavy chin to droop languidly forward. Both wore white cotton gloves, broken boots, and rather small magenta cauliflowers in their button-holes.
"My dear Raggie," said Mr. Flitters, in a gently elaborate voice, and with a gracious wave of his plump straw-distended white fingers towards his companion's chair; "you are looking very well this afternoon. You would be perfectly charming in a red wig and a cocked-hat, and a checked ulster with purple and green shadows in the folds. You would wear it beautifully, floating negligently over your shoulders. But you are wonderfully complete as you are!"
"That is so true!" acquiesced Raggie, with perfect complacency. "I am very beautiful. And you, Fustian, you are so energetically inert. Are you going to blow up to-night? You are so brilliant when you blow up."
"I have not decided either way. I never do. It will depend upon how I feel in the bonfire. I let it come if it will. The true impromptu is invariably premeditated."
"Isn't that rather self-contradictory?" said Raggie, with his pretty quick smile.
"Of course it is. Does not consistency solely consist in contradicting oneself? But I suppose I am a trifle décousu."
"You are. Indeed, we are both what those absurd clothes-dealing Philistines would call 'threadbare'—you and I."