I think I have the brand of
Tubal Cain on my brow. It is a kind of perpetual crease--"
"I too Tube," said Charles; "but I know many eminently respectable bus
people as well. Especially bus-women. They ride about, they tell me, on the
most fantastically labelled vehicles and are always seeing new suburbs swim
into their ken, and gazing--
'Out over London with a wild surmise,
Silent upon a seat of No. 10,'
or whatever the bally thing may be. But I never join their rash adventures.
I belong to a different _milieu_. I move in a sort of social underworld.
Not that I can deny, of course, that there is a certain amount of
overlapping."
"I overlapped twice to-day myself," I said, "and as the second one was
knitting a jumper--"
"And then there are the Tram-ites," he went on. "I don't understand their
world either. The tram, I am told, suddenly plunges with a loud roar like a
walrus under the streets of Holborn and emerges on the Embankment. The
hansom cabs were called the gondolas of London. The trams, I suppose, are
the submarines. But they are not of my life. I do not mingle with them."
"I mingled with a tram once," I said. "I clasped it warmly by the rail as
it was going by, but I missed the step with my foot. It spurned me rather
badly. But kindly explain what you're driving at."
"All these classes," said Charles, "have their own friendships, their own
jolts and jars, their own way of being bullied by conductors and thrown
into the mud and squeezed into cages and arranged upon straps.
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