primeing possible for amusement and jollity, and devil a sentry-box for
the exercise of it; and if you shake a leg publicly, partner or not,
you're marched off to penitence. I complain, that they have no
philosophical appreciation of human nature.'

'We pass the shop?' Victor interrupted him.

'You're in view of it in a minute. And what a square, for recreative
dancing! And what a people, to be turning it into a place of political
agitation! And what a country, where from morning to night it's an
endless wrangle about the first conditions of existence! Old Colney
seems right now and then: they 're the offspring of pirates, and they 've
got the manners and tastes of their progenitors, and the trick of
quarrelling everlastingly over the booty. I 'd have band-music here for
a couple of hours, three days of the week at the least; and down in the
East; and that forsaken North quarter of London; and the Baptist South
too. But just as those omnibus-wheels are the miserable music of this
London of ours, it 's only too sadly true that the people are in the
first rumble of the notion of the proper way to spend their lives. Now
you see the shop: Boyle and Luckwort: there.'

Victor looked. He threw his coat open, and pulled the waistcoat, and
swelled it, ahemming. 'That shop?' said he. And presently: 'Fenellan,
I'm not superstitious, I think. Now listen; I declare to you, on the day
of our drinking Old Veuve together last--you remember it,--I walked home
up this way across the square, and I was about to step into that
identical shop, for some household prescription in my pocket, having
forgotten Nataly's favourite City chemists Fenbird and Jay, when--I'm
stating a fact--I distinctly--I 'm sure of the shop--felt myself plucked
back by the elbow; pulled back the kind of pull when you have to put a