“Yes, I brought them. Twenty-four of them--the dregs, so to speak. The very last of the malgamiters, collected from all parts of the world. I was not proud of them.”
He sat down and quickly changed the conversation, showing quite clearly that this subject interested him as little as it interested his companions. He brought the latest news from London, which the ladies were glad enough to hear. For to Dorothy Roden, at least, The Hague was a place of exile, where men lived different lives and women thought different thoughts. Are there not a hundred little rivulets of news which never flow through the journals, but are passed from mouth to mouth, and seem shallow enough, but which, uniting at last, form a great stream of public opinion, and this, having formed itself imperceptibly, is suddenly found in full flow, and is so obvious that the newspapers forget to mention it? Thus colonists and other exiles returning to England, and priding themselves upon having kept in touch with the progress of events and ideas in the old country, find that their thoughts have all the while been running in the wrong channels--that seemingly great events have been considered very small, that small ideas have been lifted high by the babbling crowd which is vaguely called society.
From Tony Cornish, Mrs. Vansittart and Dorothy learnt that among other social playthings charity was for the moment being laid aside. We have inherited, it appears, a great box of playthings, and the careful student of history will find that none of the toys are new--that they have indeed been played with by our forefathers, who did just as we do. They took each toy from the box, and cried aloud that it was new, that the world had never seen its like before. Had it not, indeed? Then presently the toy--be it charity, or a new religion, or sentiment, or greed of gain, or war--is thrown back into the box again, where it lies until we of a later day drag it forth with the same cry that it is new. We grow wild with excitement over South African mines, and never recognize the old South Sea bubble trimmed anew to suit the taste of the day. We crow with delight over our East End slums, and never recognize the patched-up remnants of the last Crusade that fizzled out so ignominiously at Acre five hundred years ago.