its silken arm-slings--not the minutest trace of usage! Mr. Oxford's car
seemed to show that Mr. Oxford never used a car twice, purchasing a new
car every morning, like stockbrokers their silk hats, or the Duke of
Selsea his trousers. There was a table in the 'body' for writing, and
pockets up and down devised to hold documents, also two arm-chairs, and
a suspended contrivance which showed the hour, the temperature, and the
fluctuations of the barometer; there was also a speaking-tube. One felt
that if the machine had been connected by wireless telegraphy with the
Stock Exchange, the leading studios and the Houses of Parliament, and if
a little restaurant had been constructed in the rear, Mr. Oxford might
never have been under the necessity of leaving the car; that he might
have passed all his days in it from morn to latest eve.

The perfection of the machine and of Mr. Oxford's attire and complexion
caused Priam to look rather shabby. Indeed, he was rather shabby.
Shabbiness had slightly overtaken him in Putney. Once he had been a
dandy; but that was in the lamented Leek's time. And as the car glided,
without smell and without noise, through the encumbered avenues of
London towards the centre, now shooting forward like a star, now
stopping with gentle suddenness, now swerving in a swift curve round a
vehicle earthy and leaden-wheeled, Priam grew more and more
uncomfortable. He had sunk into a groove at Putney. He never left
Putney, save occasionally to refresh himself at the National Gallery,
and thither he invariably went by train and tube, because the tube
always filled him with wonder and romance, and always threw him up out
of the earth at the corner of Trafalgar Square with such a strange
exhilaration in his soul. So that he had not seen the main avenues of
London for a long time. He had been forgetting riches and luxury, and
the oriental cigarette-shops whose proprietors' names end in 'opoulos,'
and the haughtiness of the ruling classes, and the still sterner