But now, if I had a cropper, and got
sold up----"
"You, Beauty?" The Seraph puffed a giant puff of amazement from his
Havana, opening his blue eyes to their widest.
"Possible!" returned Bertie serenely, with a nonchalant twist to his
mustaches. "Anything's possible. If I do now, it strikes me there are
vast fields open."
"Gold fields!" suggested the Seraph, wholly bewildered.
"Gold fields? No! I mean a field for--what d'ye call it--genius. Now,
look here; nine-tenths of creatures in this world don't know how to put
on a glove. It's an art, and an art that requires long study. If a few
of us were to turn glove-fitters when we are fairly crushed, we might
civilize the whole world, and prevent the deformity of an ill-fitting
glove ever blotting creation and prostituting Houbigant. What do you
say?"
"Don't be such a donkey, Beauty!" laughed the Seraph, while his charger
threatened to passage into an oyster cart.
"You don't appreciate the majesty of great plans," rejoined Beauty
reprovingly. "There's an immense deal in what I'm saying. Think what we
might do for society--think how we might extinguish snobbery, if we
just dedicated our smash to Mankind. We might open a College, where
the traders might go through a course of polite training before they
blossomed out as millionaires; the world would be spared an agony of
dropped h's and bad bows. We might have a Bureau where we registered all
our social experiences, and gave the Plutocracy a map of Belgravia, with
all the pitfalls marked; all the inaccessible heights colored red, and
all the hard-up great people dotted with gold to show the amount they'd
be bought for--with directions to the ignoramuses whom to know, court,
and avoid.
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