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Mr. and Mrs. Button worked in a factory and took in as lodgers grimy single men who also worked in factories. They were not a model couple; they were rather, in fact, the scandal of Budge Street, which did not itself enjoy, in Bludston, a reputation for holiness. Neither was good to look upon. Mr.

And he laughed louder than was necessary, for, as it suddenly dawned upon him that he did not in the least recall to her mind the grimy little Bludston boy, the cold hand of fear was dissolved in a warm gush of exultation. "You can abuse Italy or any country but England as much as you like." "Why mustn't I abuse England?"

The house party were assembling in the drawing-room, when in sailed the great lady, the ever-memorable great lady, the Marchioness of Chudley, who had spoken to him and smiled on him in the Bludston factory. Fear laid a cold grip on his heart. He thought of pleading weakness and running away to the safe obscurity of his room. But it was too late.

In all probability the Buttons were only too glad to be rid of him. If he found no favour in the eyes of Mrs. Button, in the eyes of Button he was detestable. Occasionally he spoke of them to Barney Bill on his rare appearances in London, but for prudential motives the latter had struck Bludston out of his itinerary and could give no information. At last Paul ceased altogether to think of them.

Familiar, too, with long and hungry Sunday railway journeys when pious refreshment rooms are shut; with little mean towns like Bludston, where he and three or four of the company shared the same mean theatrical lodgings; with the dirty, insanitary theatres; with the ceaseless petty jealousies and bickerings of the ill-paid itinerant troupe.

Merewether he is still at Bludston asking who his visitor was that year and what had become of her. So she found out it was I. I've known her off and on ever since my marriage." "You were wonderfully good to me," said Paul. "I must have been a funny little wretch." "You've travelled far since then." "It was you that gave me my inspiration," said he.

He would have grown up to man's estate in the factory and have been merged an indistinguishable unit in the drab mass of cloth-capped humans who, at certain hours of the day, flood the streets of Bludston, and swarm on the roofs of clanging and shrieking tramcars, and on Saturday afternoons gather in clotted greyness on the football ground.

One hopeless month succeeded another, until a cloud seemed to close round Paul's brain, rendering him automatic in his actions, merely animal in his half-satisfied appetites. Fines and curses were his portion at the factory; curses and beatings deserved if Justice held a hurried scale at home. Paul, who had read of suicide in The Bludston Herald, turned his thoughts morbidly to death.

If I'm not going to be a great actor, I shall be a great something else. God doesn't put such things into people's heads for nothing. He didn't take me from the factory in Bludston and set me here with you, walking up Regent Street, like a gentleman, just to throw me back into the gutter." "But who said you were going back to the gutter?" asked Jane. "Nobody. I wanted to get right with myself.

"If I get in I will tell you something that will knock you flat. It will be the realization of all the silly rubbish I talked in the old brickfield at Bludston. But, dear old friend, it was you and the open road that first set me on the patriotic lay, and there's not a voter in Hickney Heath who can vote as you can for his own private and particular trained candidate."