Angela blushed again, and her lip trembled a little. Than she said softly:
"To Whitechapel! That is very interesting to me. Because, Lord Jocelyn, I belong to Whitechapel myself."
"Do you?" She might as well have said that she belonged to Seven Dials. In fact, much better, because in his young days, his Corinthian days, Lord Jocelyn had often repaired to Seven Dials to see noble sportsmen _chez_ Ben Caunt, and rat-killing, and cock-fighting, and many other beautiful forms of sport. "Do you really? Do you belong to that remarkable part of London?"
"Certainly. My grandfather--did you know him?"
"He had the brewery, you know, Messenger, Marsden & Company, in Whitechapel. He was born there, and always called himself a Whitechapel man. He seemed to be proud of it, so that in common filial respect I, too, should be proud of it. I am, in fact, a Whitechapel granddaughter."
"But that does not seem to help my unlucky Harry."
"It gives one a little more sympathy, perhaps," she said. "And that is, you know, so very useful a possession."
"Yes," but he did not seem to recognize its usefulness as regards his ward. "Well, he went to Whitechapel with a light heart. He would look round him, make the acquaintance of his own people, then he would come back again, and we would go on just as usual. At least he did not exactly say this, but I understood him so. Because it seemed impossible that a man who had once lived in society, among ourselves, and formed one of us, could ever dream of living down there." Angela laughed. From her superior knowledge of "down there," she laughed.
"He went away and I was left without him, for the first time for twenty years. It was pretty dull. He said he would give the thing a trial; he wrote to me that he was trying it; that it was not so bad as it seemed, and yet he talked as if the experiment would be a short one. I left him there. I went away for a cruise in the Mediterranean; when I came home he returned to me."
"Yes, he came back one evening, a good deal changed. I should not have thought it possible for a boy to change so much in so short a time. He wasn't ill-fed; he hadn't suffered any privation, apparently; but he was changed: he was more thoughtful; his smile and his laugh were not so ready. Poor boy!"