"is bitter cruel, and some people can't stand
against it!" And I looked at him rather hard: "Do you object to putting
any sort of floor under the feet of people like that?"

He let his voice drop a little, as if in deference to my scruples.

"Ah!" he said; "but if you once begin this sort of thing, there's no end
to it. It's so insidious. The more they have, the more they want; and
all the time they're losing fighting power. I've thought pretty deeply
about this. It's shortsighted; it really doesn't do!"

"But," I said, "surely you're not against saving people from being
knocked out of time by old age, and accidents like illness, and the
fluctuations of trade?"

"Oh!" he said, "I'm not a bit against charity. Aunt Emma's splendid
about that. And Claud's awfully good. I do what I can, myself." He
looked at me, so queerly deprecating, that I quite liked him at that
moment. At heart--I felt he was a good fellow. "All I think is," he
went on, "that to give them something that they can rely on as a matter
of course, apart from their own exertions, is the wrong principle
altogether," and suddenly his voice began to rise again, and his eyes to
stare. "I'm convinced that all this doing things for other people, and
bolstering up the weak, is rotten. It stands to reason that it must be."

He had risen to his feet, so preoccupied with the wrongness of that
principle that he seemed to have forgotten my presence. And as he stood
there in the window the light was too strong for him. All the thin
incapacity of that shadowy figure was pitilessly displayed; the desperate
narrowness in that long, pale face; the wambling look of those pale,
well-kept hands--all that made him such a ghost of a man. But his nasal,
dogmatic voice rose and rose.

"There's nothing for it but bracing up! We must cut away all this State
support; we must teach them to rely on themselves. It's all sheer
pauperisation."

And suddenly there shot through me the fear that he might burst one of
those little blue veins in his pale forehead, so vehement had he become;
and hastily I changed the subject.

"Do you like living up there with your aunt?" I asked: "Isn't it a bit
quiet?"

He turned, as if I had awakened him from a dream.

"Oh, well!" he said, "it's only till I get this job."

"Let me see--how long is it since you----?"

"Four years. She's very glad to have me, of course."

"And how's your brother Claud?"

"Oh! All right, thank