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"D'ye hear that, landlord?" cried a voice. "The genelman do mean pots all round!" "Do ye mean that same, sir?" enquired the landlord, glooming and doubtful. "I will pay for as many pots as they can drink, for good-fellowship's sake," said I, and laid down a coin. "Spoken like a true sportsman, sir!" exclaimed the down-at-heels gentleman.
For these Peter analysed the distinction are, or may be, for all alike. There is no grabbing here; a man may share the overflowing sun not with one but with all. The down-at-heels, limping, broken, army of the Have-Nots are not denied such beauty and such peace as this, if they will but take it and be glad.
And so I came away from those hot little groups with their perspiring orators, and felt again the charm of the tall buildings and the wide sunny square, and the park with Down-at-Heels warming his ragged shanks, and the great city clanging heedlessly by. How serious they all were there in their eddies! Is there no God?
Then the introductions over, the Maluka said: "Ann, now I suppose she may consider herself just 'One of Us." The homestead, standing half-way up the slope that rose from the billabong, had, after all, little of that "down-at-heels, anything'll-do" appearance that Mac had so scathingly described.
"No, by heaven!" exclaimed the down-at-heels gentleman. "I drank the fellow's beer, every drop could have drunk more. Our fat and furious friend labours under a delusion, for to drink good beer with a man out of that man's own pot is surely a mark of high esteem " "Dang your 'steem!" cried the stout fellow, flourishing his empty tankard threateningly.
You know perfectly well that it is the most capricious, the most treacherous, the most delusive, deadly, slatternly, down-at-heels, milkmaid-handed season of the year, without decision of character or fixed principles, and with only the vaguest raw-girlish ideals, a red nose between crazy smiles and streaming eyes.
Here, of a bright morning when Down-at-Heels is generously warming himself on the park benches, and Old Defeat watches Young Hurry striding by, one has a royal choice of refreshment: a "red-hot" enfolded in a bun from the dingy sausage wagon at the curb, or a plum for a penny from the Italian with the trundle cart, or news of the world in lurid gulps from the noon edition of the paper or else a curious idea or so flung out stridently over the heads of the crowd by a man on a soap box.
A little higher up, fronting on a parade ground which looks from the distance like a huge green rug spread in the sun to air, are the government offices, low structures of frame and plaster, designed so as to admit a maximum of air and a minimum of heat; the long, low building of the Planters Club, encircled by deep, cool verandahs; a Chinese joss-house, its facade enlivened by grotesque and brilliantly colored carvings; and a down-at-heels hotel.
Hill Street, with its staid distinction, and Pont Street, with its eager, pushful 'smartness, its air de petit parvenu, its obvious delight in having been 'taken up'; High Street Notting Hill, down-at-heels and unashamed, with a placid smile on its broad ugly face, and High Street Kensington, with its traces of former beauty, and its air of neatness and self-respect, as befits one who in her day has been caressed by royalty; Fleet Street, that seething channel of business, and the Strand, that swollen river of business, on whose surface float so many aimless and unsightly objects.
"The chaise shall be ready whenever you desire," said Anthony, rising, "and the postillion shall drive you wherever you appoint if if you can trust yourself to the care of such a a down-at-heels rogue as myself." "Mr. Anthony," said she, very gravely, "this morning I was a foolish girl to-night I am a woman my adventure has taught me much and a woman always knows whom she may trust.
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