In Direst Peril by David Christie Murray — Read

We met in a room in Soho, over an Italian restaurateur's. The place was dimly lit with lamps and a brace of tall candles, and down the centre of the room ran a long, unclothed table, with chairs ranged at either side of it. The men who formed our council were of every social grade, and in the crowd which hung about the room at the moment of my entrance there were two or three who would have passed social muster anywhere, and two or three who were shaggy, unkempt, and ragged enough to have been taken for beggars. One or two wore the short round jacket which is the trade-mark of the Italian waiter, and one, a diamond merchant from Hatton Garden, carried so much of his own stock in trade in open evidence about him that he would have been a fortune to a dozen of the poorer brethren.

But whether they were prince or peasant, lean tutor, fat padrone, coarse stockbroker, or polished noble, they were all at one in patriotism, and there was not a man there who had not proved himself up to the hilt, and who was not given, body and soul, to The Cause.