Lord Raggie, with his head bent, listened with a smile parting the scarlet thread of his lips, a smile in his pretty hollow eyes. "I wonder why people should be exhorted to remember such a prosaic and commonplace crime as that," he meditated aloud: "a crime, too, that had not even the vulgar merit of being a success!"
"Only failures ever do succeed, really," said Fustian, leaning largely over his barrow. "How deliciously they are joggling us! Don't you like having your innermost shavings stimulated, Raggie?"
"There is only one stimulating thing in the world," was the languid answer; "and that is a soporific. But see, Fustian, here comes one of those unconsciously absurd persons they call policemen. How stiffly he holds himself. Why is there something so irresistibly ludicrous about every creature that possesses a spine? Perhaps because to be vertebrate is to be normal, and the normal is necessarily such a hideous monstrosity. I love what are called warped distorted figures. The only real Adonis nowadays is a Guy." And the shrill voices of the young choristers, detaching themselves one by one from the melodic fabric in which they were enmeshed, grew fainter and fainter still—until they slipped at last into silence. "Fustian, did you notice? Our rose-white adherents have abandoned us. They have run away—'done a guy,' as vulgarians express it."
"They have done two," said Mr. Flitters correctively; "which only proves the absolute sincerity of their devotion. Is not the whole art of fidelity comprised in knowing exactly when to betray?"
"How original you are to-day, Fustian! But what is this crude blue copper going to do with you and me? Can we be going to become notorious—really notorious—at last?"
"I devoutly trust not. Notoriety is now merely a synonym for respectable obscurity. But he certainly appears to be engaged in what a serious humourist would call 'running us in.'"
"How pedantic of him! Then shan't we be allowed to explode at all this evening?"
"It seems not. They think we are dangerous. How can one tell? Perhaps we are. Give me a light, Raggie, and I will be brilliant for you alone. Come, the young Shoeblack bends to his brush, and the pale-faced Coster watches him in his pearly kicksies; the shadows on the mussels in the fish-stall are violet, and the vendor of halfpenny ices is washing the spaces of his tumblers with primrose and with crimson. Let me be brilliant, dear boy, or I feel that I shall burst for sheer vacuity, and pass away, as so many of us have passed, with all my combustibles still in me!"
And with gentle resignation, as martyrs whose apotheosis is merely postponed, Lord Raggie and Fustian Flitters allowed themselves to be slowly moved on by the rude hand of an unsympathetic Peeler.
