Chapter 10
THE MISSION
The great dim place was full, but crowding had not been permitted.
With a few exceptions in the outlying parts, everybody had a seat.
G.J. was favourably placed for seeing the whole length of the
interior. Accustomed to the restaurants of fashionable hotels,
auction-rooms, theatrical first-nights, the haunts of sport, clubs,
and courts of justice, he soon perceived, from the numerous samples
which he himself was able to identify, that all the London worlds were
fully represented in the multitude--the official world, the political,
the clerical, the legal, the municipal, the military, the artistic,
the literary, the dilettante, the financial, the sporting, and the
world whose sole object in life apparently is to be observed and
recorded at all gatherings to which admittance is gained by privilege
and influence alone.
There were in particular women the names and countenances and
family history of whom were familiar to hundreds of thousands of
illustrated-newspaper readers, even in the most distant counties, and
who never missed what was called a "function," whether "brilliant,"
"exclusive," or merely scandalous. At murder trials, at the sales of
art collections, at the birth of musical comedies, at boxing matches,
at historic debates, at receptions in honour of the renowned, at
luscious divorce cases, they were surely present, and the entire
Press surely noted that they were present.
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