and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of
Redmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, and we listened
to him and thought him over. He was the voice of wrongs that made us
indignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he had 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 administrative 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