hat never dominated in
his life. He wants to overthrow the over-lords so he can rule himself.
He wants to crowd me so he can push into a place beside me."

Moore laughed with an overdone enjoyment.

"Excellent," he said, squeezing the words out of his knees. "You're such
a humourist."

If he wanted to be offensive, that was the keenest cut he could have
delivered.

"I have often thought," said the colonel, beginning in a hesitating,
deferent way that made his utterance rather notable, "that we saddle
what we call the lower orders with motives different from our own."

"Precisely," Choate clipped in. "We used to think, when they committed a
perfectly logical crime, like stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread, that
it was absolutely different from anything we could have done. Whereas in
their places we should have tried precisely the same thing. Just as
cleanliness is a matter of bathtubs and temperature. We shouldn't bathe
if we had to break the ice over a quart of water and then go out and run
a trolley car all day."

Lydia's face, its large eyes fixed upon him, said so plainly "I don't
believe it" that he laughed, with a sudden enjoyment of her, and, after
an instant of wider-eyed surprise, she laughed too.

"And here's Miss Amabel," Choate went on, in the voice it seemed he kept
for her, "going to the outer extreme and believing, because the
labouring man has been bled, that he's incapable of bleeding you. Don't
you think it, Miss Amabel. He's precisely like the rest of us. Like me.
Like Weedon here. He'll sit up on his platform and judge me like forty
thousand prophets out of Israel; but put him where I am and he'll cling
with his eyelids and stick there. Just as I shall."

Miss Amabel looked deeply troubled and also at a loss.

"I only think, Alston," she said, "that so much insight, so much of the
deepest knowledge comes of pain. And the poor have suffered pain so many
centuries. They've learned things we don't know. Look how they help one
another. Look at their self-sacrifice."

"Look at your own self-sacrifice," said Choate.

"Oh, but they know," said she. The flame of a great desire was in her
face. "I don't know what it is to be hungry. If I starved myself I
shouldn't know, because in somebody's pantry would be the bread-box I
could put my hand into. They know, Alston. It gives them insight. When
they remember the road they've travelled, they're not going to make the
mistakes we've made."

"Oh, yes,