Aladdin of London, or The Lodestar

"I like to be in beautiful places," he confessed in his turn, "and this place seems to me very beautiful. Does it really matter to us, Forrest, what the people do or what they are so long as they don't ask us to be the same? Jimmy Dale, a parson in Whitechapel, used to say that a man was just what his conscience made him. I don't see how the fact of living in or out of a hotel would matter anyway--unless you leave your conscience in a cab. The rest is mostly talk, and untrue at that, they say. You yourself know that you don't believe half of it."

"My dear man, what would life be if one were incredulous? How would the newspaper proprietors buy bread and cheese, to say nothing of pâte de foie gras and ninety-two Pommery if the world desired the truth? This crowd is mostly on the brink of a precipice, and a man or a woman goes over every day. Then you have the law report and old Righteousness in a white wig, who has not been found out, to pronounce a judgment. I'd like to wager that not one in three of these people ever did an honest day's work in a lifetime. One half is rank idle--the other half is trying to live on the remainder. Work it out and pass me the wine--and mind you don't get setting up any images for time to knock down--eh, what?"

Alban would not wrangle with him, and for a little while he ate in silence, watching the sparkling throng and listening to such scraps of conversation as floated to him from merry tables. Down in Union Street it had been the fashion to decry idleness and the crimes of the rich--the orators having it that leisure was criminal and ease a heinous sin. Alban had never believed in any such fallacy. "We are all born lazy," he had said, "and few of us would work unless we had to. Vanity is at the bottom of all that we do. If no one were vain, the world would stand still." In the Savoy, his arguments seemed to be justified a hundredfold. A sense of both content and dignity came to him. He began almost to believe that money could ennoble as well as satisfy.

Willy Forrest, of course, knew nothing whatever of thoughts such as these. He was a past master in the art of killing time and he boasted that he rarely knew an "idle hour." His programme for this day seemed altogether beyond criticism.

"We'll look in at the club afterwards and play a game of bridge--you can stand by me and see me win--or perhaps you'd like a side bet. Then we might turn into the park to give the girls a treat--eh, what?--and go on to the New Bridge Club to dress. After that there's the old sporting shanty and a bit of a mill between Neddy Tinker and Marsh Hill. You never saw a fight, I suppose? Man, but your education has been neglected."