Oh, London, London! siren town! how it bewitched the girl! Its cab-horse bells were fairy; its evening, as they entered, hung with a myriad magic moons and stars. The far-stretching streets with their flaming jewel windows, the temples in the upper dusk, and the solemn squares crowding round country trees; the throngs of people, the odours of fruit-shops, the passion of flowers, the mornings silvery grey, and the multitudinous monuments rimed by years, thunder of hoofs in ways without end, and the silence of mighty parks,—Bud lay awake in the nights to think of them.
Jim Molyneux had the siren by the throat: he loved her, and shook a living out of her hands. At first she had seemed to him too old, too calm, too slow and stately as compared with his own Chicago, nor did she seem to have a place for any stranger: now he had found she could be bullied,—that a loud voice, a bold front, and the aid of a good tailor could compel her to disgorge respect and gold. He had become the manager of a suburban theatre, where oranges were eaten in the stalls, and the play was as often as not “The Father’s Curse”; but once a day he walked past Thespian temples in the city, and, groaning at their mismanagement, planned an early future for himself with classic fronts of marble, and duchesses advertising him each night by standing in rows on the pavement awaiting their carriages. Far along Grove Lane, where he dwelt in a pea-green house with nine French-bean rows and some clumps of bulbs behind, one could distinguish his coming by the smartness of his walk and the gleam of the sunshine on his hat. He had one more secret of success—teetotalism. “Scotch and soda,” he would say, “that’s what ails the boys, and makes ’em sleepier than Hank M’Cabe’s old tom-cat. Good boys, dear boys, they’ve always got the long-lost-brother grip, but they’re mighty prone to dope assuagements for the all-gone feeling in the middle of the day. When they’ve got cobwebs in their little brilliantined belfries, I’m full of the songs of spring and merry old England’s on the lee. See? I don’t even need to grab; all I’ve got to do is to look deserving, and the stuff comes crowding in: it always does to a man who looks like ready-money, and don’t lunch on cocktails and cloves.”