An Unpardonable Liar by Gilbert Parker — Read

The next morning George Hagar was early at the pump-room. He found it amusing to watch the crowds coming and going -- earnest invalids and that most numerous body of middle aged, middle class people who have no particular reason for drinking the waters, and whose only regimen is getting even with their appetites. He could pick out every order at a glance -- he did not need to wait until he saw the tumblers at their lips.

Now and then a dashing girl came gliding in, and, though the draft was noxious to her, drank the stuff off with a neutral look and well bred indifference to the distress about her. Or in strode the private secretary of some distinguished being in London, S. W. He invariably carried his glass to the door, drank it off in languid sips as he leaned indolently against the masonry, and capped the event by purchasing a rose for his buttonhole, so making a ceremony which smacked of federating the world at a common public drinking trough into a little fete. Or there were the good priests from a turbulent larruping island, who with cheeks blushing with health and plump waistcoats came ambling, smiling, to their thirty ounces of noisome liquor.