Gloria Mundi by Harold Frederic

Author:Harold Frederic [Frederic, Harold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Klassiker
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2017-06-22T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter XIV

The two young men dined at the Café Royal. "It's as good a kitchen as there is in London, and in the matter of people it isn't such a tiresome repetition of those one meets everywhere else as Willis's or the Prince's. To see the same shoulders and the same necks, night after night — a fellow gets tired of it."

To this explanation by Dicky of his choice, as they rolled forward in their hansom. Christian made no direct response. After a little he said: "Very soon now, I am going to do something that seems to have been in my mind for months. Perhaps I have only thought of it since this afternoon: I cannot be sure. But I am going to do it — I am going to know for myself what the real London and the real England are like. A thousand gentlemen in black clothes and silk hats, a thousand ladies with low-cut dresses and feathers in their hair — all thinking and talking about themselves and their own little affairs — that does not mean London. And a few large houses in the country, where, these same people spend a few months riding after the hounds and shooting tame birds and wearying each other with idle, sleepy talk — that does not represent England."

"Doesn't it!" cried Westland. "I should say that's just what it did, worse luck!"

"No, no!" protested Christian. "I don't want to be told that it does — for then I should want to go away altogether. No — there is the other thing, and I am going to find it out, and see it and know it. When all those years of my boyhood and youth I was so proud of being an Englishman, it was not this empty, valueless life of the West End, or the chase of foxes and birds in the country, that I longed for, and nourished pride in."

"Oh, but they do other things, you know, " laughed Dicky. "They are "in Parliament, some of them, or they are at the bar, or in the Services, or they manage estates or are directors in companies, and that sort of thing. And some of them go in a lot for charities, and work on committees and organize things, you know. You'd hardly believe how much of that most of the women let themselves in for."

"That is not what I mean, " said the other, rather abruptly. "To me all that is not worth the snap of a finger, " and he emphasized his words by a gesture with the hand which rested on the door of the hansom.

At an advanced stage of the dinner, the young men came to the subject again. In reply to a random inquiry Christian said that his grandfather, the duke, as far as he knew, was neither worse nor better in health than he had been all winter. "I have not been to Caermere since my first visit," he went on. " I am really living upon a programme arranged for me, I should think, by a committee of my relations.

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