The falling edifice had not been exactly a home. It
had been even more than that. It had been a refuge from many homes. It
had been a club.
Certainly it had not been a particularly distinguished club. Its
demolition could not have been stayed on the plea that Charles James
Fox had squandered his substance in its card-room, or that Lord
Melbourne had loved to doze on the bench in its hall. Nothing sublime
had happened in it. No sublime person had belonged to it. Persons
without the vaguest pretensions to sublimity had always, I believe,
found quick and easy entrance into it. It had been a large nondescript
affair. But (to adapt Byron) a club's a club tho' every one's in it.
The ceremony of election gives it a cachet which not even the smartest
hotel has. And then there is the note-paper, and there are the news-
papers, and the cigars at wholesale prices, and the not-to-be-tipped
waiters, and other blessings for mankind. If the members of this club
had but migrated to some other building, taking their effects and
their constitution with them, the ruin would have been pathetic
enough. But alas! the outward wreck was a symbol, a result, of inner
dissolution. Through the door of the hoarding the two pillars of the
front door told a sorry tale.
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