March thought this not at all a bad thing in them; he smiled in
patronage of their simple pathos; he paid the tribute of a laugh when the
poet turned, as he sometimes did, from his conception of angel and martyr
motherhood, and portrayed the mother in her more familiar phases of
virtue and duty, with the retributive shingle or slipper in her hand. He
bought a pocketful of this literature, popular in a sense which the most
successful book can never be, and enlisted the ballad vendor so deeply in
the effort to direct him to Lindau's dwelling by the best way that he
neglected another customer, till a sarcasm on his absent-mindedness stung
hint to retort, "I'm a-trying to answer a gentleman a civil question;
that's where the absent-minded comes in."
It seemed for some reason to be a day of leisure with the Chinese
dwellers in Mott Street, which March had been advised to take first. They
stood about the tops of basement stairs, and walked two and two along the
dirty pavement, with their little hands tucked into their sleeves across
their breasts, aloof in immaculate cleanliness from the filth around
them, and scrutinizing the scene with that cynical sneer of faint
surprise to which all aspects of our civilization seem to move their
superiority.
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