It seems to belong,
somehow or other, to the days of Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen. I
suppose that is because I always feel that I am living a little way in
the future."
Tea was brought in, and a place cleared for the tray upon a crowded
table. Afterwards she lit a cigarette and threw herself upon the
lounge.
"Turn your chair around towards me," she invited. "This is the hour I
like best of any during the day. Do you see what a beautiful view I
have of the Houses of Parliament? And there across the river, behind
that mist, the cesspool begins. Sometimes I lie here and think. I see
right into Bermondsey and Rotherhithe and all those places and think out
the lives of the people as they are being lived. Then I look through
those wonderful windows there--how they glitter in the sunshine, don't
they!--and I think I hear the men speak whom they have sent to plead
their cause. Some Demosthenes from Tower Hill exhausts himself with
phrase-making, shouts himself into a perspiration, drawing lurid,
pictures of hideous and apparent wrongs, and a hundred or so
well-dressed legislators whisper behind the palms of their hands, make
their plans for the evening and trot into their appointed lobbies like
sheep when the division bell rings.
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