“Poor dear lady,” he said, “all those years! And poor Jack Allway.” He seemed to be talking to himself. Suddenly he turned to her. “How is the dear fellow?” he asked. Madge looked at her in silence for quite a while. “How confident you are,” she said. “How I envy you.”!

“They did, at first,” he answered. “The time-servers and the hypocrites among them. I made it a condition that they should be teetotallers, and chapel goers, and everything else that I thought good for them. I thought that I could save their souls by bribing them with cheap rents and share of profits. And then the union came, and that of course finished it.” He held her to him for what seemed a long while. There was strength in his arms, in spite of the bowed shoulders and white hair.

“There are more important things than saving men’s bodies. You think that, don’t you?” he asked. She would build again the Forum. The people’s business should no longer be settled for them behind lackey-guarded doors. The good of the farm labourer should be determined not exclusively by the squire and his relations. The man with the hoe, the man with the bent back and the patient ox-like eyes: he, too, should be invited to the Council board. Middle-class domestic problems should be solved not solely by fine gentlemen from Oxford; the wife of the little clerk should be allowed her say. War or peace, it should no longer be regarded as a question concerning only the aged rich. The common people—the cannon fodder, the men who would die, and the women who would weep: they should be given something more than the privilege of either cheering platform patriots or being summoned for interrupting public meetings. “But perhaps you’ve changed your mind,” he said. “It isn’t quite as pretty as it’s painted.”