the things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and
beauty. There's a sort of filiation. . . . Your Altiora's just the
political equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for
embroidery; she's a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour.
The real progress, Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller
thing and a slower thing altogether. Look! THAT"--and he pointed
to where under a boarding in the light of a gas lamp a dingy
prostitute stood lurking--"was in Babylon and Nineveh. Your little
lot make believe there won't be anything of the sort after this
Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top notes from Altiora
Bailey! Remington!--it's foolery. It's prigs at play. It's make-
believe, make-believe! Your people there haven't got hold of
things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything
of life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean
rooms and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night
goes by outside--untouched. Those Crampton fools slink by all
this,"--he waved at the woman again--"pretend it doesn't exist, or
is going to be banished root and branch by an Act to keep children
in the wet outside public-houses. Do you think they really care,
Remington? I don't. It's make-believe. What they want to do, what
Lewis wants to do, what Mrs. Bunting Harblow wants her husband to
do, is to sit and feel very grave and necessary and respected on the
Government benches. They think of putting their feet out like
statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with becoming brims down over
their successful noses. Presentation portrait to a club at fifty.
That's their Reality. That's their scope. They don't, it's
manifest, WANT to think beyond that. The things there ARE,
Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,--
lust, and the night-sky,--pain."