"I hope so, most sincerely. There is something so hopelessly middle-class about wearing perfectly new clothes. It always reminds me of that ridiculous Nature, who will persist in putting all her poor little trees into brand-new suits of hideous non-arsenical green every spring. As if withered leaves, or even nudity itself, would not really be infinitely more decent! I detest a coat that is what the world calls a 'fit!'"
"Clothes that fit," observed Lord Raggie, gravely, "are the natural penalty for possessing that dreadful deformity, a good figure. Only exploded mediocrities like Tupper and Bunn and Shakspeare ought to have figures."
"Had Shakspeare a figure? I thought it was only a bust."
"We shall have our little bust by and by, I suppose," said Raggie, pensively. "I wonder when. I feel in the mood to sally forth and paint the night with strange scarlet, slashed with silver and gold, while our young votaries—beautiful pink boys in paper hats—let off marvellous pale epigrammatic crackers and purple paradoxical squibs in our honour."
"See, Raggie, here come our youthful disciples! Do they not look deliciously innocent and enthusiastic? I wish, though, we could contrive to imbue them with something of our own lovely limpness—they are so atrociously lively and active."
"That will come, Fustian," said Lord Raggie, indulgently. "We must give them time. Already they have copied our distinctive costume, caught our very features and colouring. Some day, Fustian, some day they will adopt our mystic emblem—the symbol that is such a true symbol in possessing no meaning whatever—the Magenta Cauliflower! And then—and then——."
"——It will be time for Us to drop it," continued Mr. Fustian Flitters, with his peculiar smile of inscrutable obviousness.
"Beautiful rose-coloured children!" murmured Lord Raggie, dreamily; "how sad to think that they will all grow up and degenerate into pork-butchers, and generals, and bishops, and absurdly futile persons of that sort! But listen; it is so sweet of them—they are going to sing an exquisite little catch I composed expressly for them, a sort of mellifluously raucous chant with no tune in particular. That is where it is so wonderful. True melody is always quite tuneless!"
One by one the shrill, passionate young voices chimed in, until the very lamp-posts throbbed and rang with the words, and they seemed to wander away, away among the sleeping pageant of the chimney-pots, away to the burnished golden globes of the struggling pawnbroker.
"Please ter remember. The Fifth o' November. For Gun Powder Plot.
Ter blow up the King and 'is Porliment. Shall never. Be. Forgot!
'Oller, Boys, 'Oller!"