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A well-dressed, good-looking young man, walking on the other side of the Square, did not fail to witness Tom Ryfe's farewell and Maud's interview with the crossing-sweeper. He too looked strangely disturbed, pacing up and down an adjoining street, more than once, before he could make up his mind to ring a well-known bell.
After what you have heard, are the Melmottes people with whom you would wish to be connected? 'I don't know. 'I do. I know very well. They are absolutely disgraceful. A social connection with the first crossing-sweeper would be less objectionable. He spoke with a degree of energy of which he was himself altogether unaware. He knit his brows, and his eyes flashed, and his nostrils were extended.
From the heir to the throne to the crossing-sweeper, all combined to do him honour; where Garibaldi was not, through the breadth of the land the very poor bought his portrait and pasted it on their whitewashed cottage walls. London made him its citizen. The greatest living English poet invited him to plant a tree in his garden: a memory he recalled nearly at the close of his own honoured life:
That doesn't interest me. I wish to know whether you like her as you don't like me and the King and the crossing-sweeper?" "Charmian Heath and I are good friends. I am interested in her." "In a woman!" "Greatly because she is a woman." "I know you're a suffragette at heart!" They talked a little about politics. When coffee came, Mrs. Shiffney suddenly said: "I'll take you over to Algiers, Susan."
A lamp stood in the window there and the tap of a light hammer informed him that the indefatigable Pole was still at work. In truth, old Paul was bending copper tubing for a firm which said that he had no equal at the task and paid him a wage which would have been despised by a crossing-sweeper. Alban entered the garret quietly and was a little startled by the sharp exclamation which greeted him.
"But he went bankrupt," went on Nicholas. "Ah!" exclaimed Roger, "Soames will have trouble with her; you mark my words, he'll have trouble she's got a foreign look." Nicholas licked his lips. "She's a pretty woman," and he waved aside a crossing-sweeper. "How did he get hold of her?" asked Roger presently. "She must cost him a pretty penny in dress!"
He was, however, a man who liked to talk with all sorts of people, and he may have gathered those illuminating facts at second or third hand, from a crossing-sweeper, from a retired police officer, from some vague man in his club, or even, perhaps, from a Minister of State met at some public or private reception. Of the illuminating quality there could be no doubt whatever.
When we went to see the woman, Jenny, we found her in her poor little cottage, nursing a vagrant boy called Jo, a crossing-sweeper, who had tramped down from London, and was tramping he didn't know where.
"I believe poor mamma would let me marry a crossing-sweeper, if I cried and declared it would make me miserable not to marry him," said Charlotte; "but then, you see, mamma's wishes mean Mr. Sheldon's wishes; she is sure to think whatever he tells her to think; and if he is strongly against our marriage " "As I am sure he will be," I interjected.
Nevertheless, the Lares and Penates of The Square, who varied as individuals but remained the same as inherent principles its Policeman, its Milk, its Wash, its Crossing-Sweeper even after the germ of contagion had been identified beyond a doubt as a resident in Drury Lane, held fast to a belief that Typhus had been dormant at the corner house since the days of the Regency, and had seized an opportunity when nothing antiseptic was looking, to break out and send temperatures up to 106° F. For, said they, when was the windows of that house opened last?
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