FROM A DISTANCE
tendency to regard those he sees in carriages as insolent servants conducting people who "are no better than they should be". The essential Bohemian must think of those whose sign visual is the aligned brass knockers of suburban streets, as sluggish-minded and intolerable. Thus, humanity not caring to think about what it does not like, the villa resident away from London will see a vision of "Parks" and "Gardens", surrounded by uninteresting or repulsive districts of small houses; the working man thinks of High Streets, of small streets, of tenement blocks, set down on the fringes of villadom.
The limits of the classes are not of course so crudely definite but that there is an infinity of individual variants. There are the crowds of philanthropists who make swallow flights into slums, the mechanics who dream of their own carriages. There is room for millennialists who strive to create Garden Cities, for socialist prophets who read in the skies signs of an approaching Armageddon after which all men shall be alike in tastes as in habituation. But in the bulk the Londoner is anything rather than tolerant of a class not his own; the unfamiliar is almost inevitably the iniquitous.
We may, among the October partridges, have a sudden vision of a slinking, horribly suggestive pair of figures. We saw them as we walked gaily home from the very best ball of last season, in the pale delicate stillness of dawn, at the mouth of a black court, under the unclean light of a street lamp held out from
19
