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"Of course," replied Daphne, "my father discussed his intention with me, but the thought was entirely his own. True, Hermon's Street-Boy eating Figs was not exactly according to his taste, but it pleased him better than his former works, and I agree with Euphranor, it is remarkably true to nature. My father perceived this too.
There's no man so low or so ridiculous but he finds somebody else more so, and the London street-boy who sneers at the long-haired poet is exalted to a sense of superiority. I once met a human monstrosity hunch-backed, cross-eyed, palsied, and wooden-legged. My soul sickened with pity, but his face brightened in a smile of contempt and his cross-eyes danced with glee.
And all these circumstances she met with absolute carelessness, with a devil-may-care laugh, or the sigh of one weary, but not afraid. She was no more timid than the average English street-boy. Only these two men, one dead, one alive, knew how to dress her in terror from head to foot, brain, heart, and body. And so she joined them in a ghastly brotherhood.
We struggled through an interminable succession of squalid streets, from the one lamp visible to its neighbour in the darkness: you might have fancied yourself peering at the head of an old saint on a smoky canvas; it was like the painting of light rather than light. Temple spoke solemnly: Our dinner-hour at home is half-past six. A street-boy overheard him and chaffed him.
You'll get the feeling for it in a half a dozen shows and be as keen on it as the rest of us. "But the Emperor is different. Perhaps it's because he is such a booky man and spends so much time in reading and study. But I think not. There never was anybody more of a bookworm than Numisia and she is as wild over the shows as any street-boy in Rome.
The words "Domenica," Sunday, and "Messa," mass, were scrawled everywhere in capitals, in roundhand, large and small. Then to give the whole the air of having been designed by a street-boy, there were other words, such as "Viva Pio IX.," "Viva il Papa Re," and across these, in a different manner, and in green paint, "Viva Garibaldi," "Morte a Antonelli," and similar revolutionary sentiments.
The aim of this novel is to describe the course of a street-boy who takes to thieving before he knows that it is not a legitimate business, and who being possessed naturally of a good character is brought to repentance and reform when subjected to better influences.
Here he changed his tunic of brass buttons for a plain gray jacket, snatched his cap from its hook, gained the street by a back stair, and set off at the tireless street-boy trot that eats up the blocks.
It is by comparing the fundamental matter of jests, as you rise in the social scale from the street-boy to the peer of France, that the observer arrives at a true comprehension of M. de Talleyrand's maxim, "The manner is everything"; an elegant rendering of the legal axiom, "The form is of more consequence than the matter."
The Countess Livia, not an innocent like Henrietta had escaped the poisoned tongues by contracting a third marriage 'in time! Lady Arpington said; and the knotty question was presented to a young mind: Why are the innocents tempted to their ruin, and the darker natures allowed an escape? Any street-boy could have told her of the virtue in quick wits.
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