been shy and seemed not a little incompetent, his provincial accent

became a beauty of his earnest speech, we were carried away by his

indignations. We looked with shining eyes at one another and at the

various dons who had dropped in and were striving to maintain a

front of judicious severity. We felt more and more that social

injustice must cease, and cease forthwith. We felt we could not

sleep upon it. At the end we clapped and murmured our applause and

wanted badly to cheer.

Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling. Denson,

that indolent, liberal-minded sceptic, did most of the questioning.

He lay contorted in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs

crossed and his left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with

a long thin hand and occasionally adjusted the unstable glasses that

hid his watery eyes. "I don't want to carp," he began. "The

present system, I admit, stands condemned. Every present system

always HAS stood condemned in the minds of intelligent men. But

where it seems to me you get thin, is just where everybody has been

thin, and that's when you come to the remedy."

"Socialism," said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, and

Hatherleigh said "Hear! Hear!" very resolutely.

"I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer," said Denson, getting

his shoulder-blades well down to the seat of his chair; "but I

don't. I don't, you know. It's rather a shame to cross-examine you

after this fine address of yours"-Chris Robinson on the hearthrug

made acquiescent and inviting noises-"but the real question

remains how exactly are you going to end all these wrongs? There

are the admimstrative questions. If you abolish the private owner,

I admit you abolish a very complex and clumsy way of getting

businesses run, land controlled and things in general administered,

but you don't get rid of the need of administration, you know."

"Democracy," said Chris Robinson.

"Organised somehow," said Denson. "And it's just the How perplexes

me. I can quite easily imagine a socialist state administered in a

sort of scrambling tumult that would be worse than anything we have

got now.

"Nothing could be worse than things are now," said Chris Robinson.

"I have seen little children-"

"I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily

be worse-or life in a beleagured town."

Murmurs.

They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect upon me of coming

out from the glow of a good matinee performance into the cold

daylight of late afternoon. Chris Robinson did not shine in

conflict with Denson; he was an orator and not a dialectician, and

he missed Denson's points and displayed a disposition to plunge into

untimely pathos and indignation. And Denson hit me curiously hard

with one of his shafts. "Suppose," he said, "you found yourself

prime minister-"

I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little

ruffled and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the

huge machine of government muddled and mysterious. Oh! but I was

perplexed!

And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and

smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands

that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the

cartoon of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive

talk with him.

"Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?" he said.

Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and

again he came back to that discussion. "It's all very easy for your

learned men to sit and pick holes," he said, "while the children

suffer and die. They don't pick holes up north. They mean

business."

He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his

going to work in a factory when he was twelve-" when you Chaps were

all with your mammies "-and how he had educated himself of nights

until he would fall asleep at his reading.

"It's made many of us keen for all our lives," he remarked, "all

that clemming for education. Why! I longed all through one winter

to read a bit of Darwin. I must know about this Darwin if I die for

it, I said. And I couldno' get the book."

Hatherleigh made an enthusiastic noise and drank beer at him with

round eyes over the mug.

"Well, anyhow I wasted no time on Greek and Latin," said Chris

Robinson. "And one learns to go straight at a thing without

splitting straws. One gets hold of the Elementals."

(Well, did they? That was the gist of my perplexity.)

"One doesn't quibble," he said, returning to his rankling memory of

Denson, "while men decay and starve."

"But suppose," I said, suddenly dropping into opposition, "the

alternatve is to risk a worse disaster-or do something patently

futile."

"I don't follow that," said Chris Robinson. "We don't propose

anything futile, so far as I can see."