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 drinking-house, and the gilded lamps of a dancing-garden.' We must have men capable of so much as that—yet they are either never employed or never listened to; the truth I fear is that a public work now-a-days with us is like a plant being carried to be planted in a city square, of which every one who passes it plucks off a leaf: by the time it reaches its destination the plant is leafless. The public work is the plant, and the money to be got from it is the foliage; provided each one plucks as much foliage as he can, no one cares in what state the plant reaches the piazza."

Lady Hilda looked at him as he spoke with an eloquence and earnestness which absorbed him for the moment, so that he forgot that he was talking to a woman, and a woman whose whole life was one of trifling, of languor, and of extravagance.

"All that is very true," she said, with some hesitation; "but why then do you hold yourself aloof—why do you do nothing to change this state of public things? You see the evil, but you prescribe no remedy."