“I want to know,” she said. “We have been meaning to call on you so often,” panted Mrs. Phillips. The room was crowded and the exertion of squeezing her way through had winded the poor lady. “We take so much interest in your articles. My husband—” she paused for a second, before venturing upon the word, and the aitch came out somewhat over-aspirated—“reads them most religiously. You must come and dine with us one evening.”!

A little laugh escaped her. “I spent a week at Grimsby, some years ago, organizing a fisherman’s union. They used to throw the fish back into the sea, tons upon tons of it, that men had risked their lives to catch, that would have fed half London’s poor. There was a ‘glut’ of it, they said. The ‘market’ didn’t want it. Funny, isn’t it, a ‘glut’ of food: and the kiddies can’t learn their lessons for want of it. I was talking with a farmer down in Kent. The plums were rotting on his trees. There were too many of them: that was the trouble. The railway carriage alone would cost him more than he could get for them. They were too cheap. So nobody could have them. It’s the muddle of the thing that makes me mad—the ghastly muddle-headed way the chief business of the world is managed. There’s enough food could be grown in this country to feed all the people and then of the fragments each man might gather his ten basketsful. There’s no miracle needed. I went into the matter once with Dalroy of the Board of Agriculture. He’s the best man they’ve got, if they’d only listen to him. It’s never been organized: that’s all. It isn’t the fault of the individual. It ought not to be left to the individual. The man who makes a corner in wheat in Chicago and condemns millions to privation—likely enough, he’s a decent sort of fellow in himself: a kind husband and father—would be upset for the day if he saw a child crying for bread. My dog’s a decent enough little chap, as dogs go, but I don’t let him run my larder.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. “A mutual friend, a Mr. Airlie, happened to be of the party, and he mentioned you.” “Oh, she’s going to break it off unless we all assure her that we find him brainy,” Madge explained with a laugh. “It seems her father wasn’t brainy and her mother was. Or else it was the other way about: I’m not quite sure. But whichever it was, it led to ructions. Myself, if he’s at all possible and seems to care for her, I intend to find him brilliant.” “You can ask that,” he said: “you, a soldier? Does the soldier say: ‘I am of no use. I am but a poor man of no account. Who has need of such as I?’ God has need of all. There is none that shall not help to win the victory. It is with his life the soldier serves. Who were they whose teaching moved the world more than it has ever yet been moved by the teaching of the wisest? They were men of little knowledge, of but little learning, poor and lowly. It was with their lives they taught.”