Even to have kicked an outsider might have been
held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation, so that, perhaps,
it would have required an act of Parliament to restore its purity of
blood. What words, then, could express the horror, and the sense of
treason, in that case, which _had_ happened, where all three
outsides (the trinity of Pariahs) made a vain attempt to sit down at
the same breakfast-table or dinner-table with the consecrated four? I
myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old
gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy associates, by
suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted for this criminal
attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a case of
lunacy or _delirium tremens_ rather than of treason. England owes
much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her
social composition, when pulling against her strong democracy. I am not
the man to laugh at it. But sometimes, undoubtedly, it expressed itself
in comic shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the
particular attempt which I have noticed, was that the waiter, beckoning
them away from the privileged _salle-a-manger_, sang out, "This
way, my good men," and then enticed these good men away to the kitchen.
But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though rarely, cases
occurred where the intruders, being stronger than usual, or more
vicious than usual, resolutely refused to budge, and so far carried
their point as to have a separate table arranged for themselves in a
corner of the general room.
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