h Miss Seyffert acting the part of an almost ostentatiously
discreet chorus, it was inevitable that their conversation should
become, by imperceptible gradations, more personal and intimate. They
kept up the pose, which was supposed to represent Dr. Martineau's
philosophy, of being Man and Woman on their Planet considering its
Future, but insensibly they developed the idiosyncrasies of their
position. They might profess to be Man and Woman in the most general
terms, but the facts that she was the daughter not of Everyman but old
Grammont and that Sir Richmond was the angry leader of a minority upon
the Fuel Commission became more and more important. "What shall we do
with this planet of ours?" gave way by the easiest transitions to "What
are you and I doing and what have we got to do? How do you feel about it
all? What do you desire and what do you dare?"

It was natural that Sir Richmond should talk of his Fuel Commission to
a young woman whose interests in fuel were even greater than his own.
He found that she was very much better read than he was in the recent
literature of socialism, and that she had what he considered to be a
most unfeminine grasp of economic ideas. He thought her attitude
towards socialism a very sane one because it was also his own. So far as
socialism involved the idea of a scientific control of natural resources
as a common property administered in the common interest, she and he
were very greatly attracted by it; but so far as it served as a form of
expression for the merely insubordinate discontent of the many with
the few, under any conditions, so long as it was a formula for class
jealousy and warfare, they were both repelled by it. If she had had any
illusions about the working class possessing as a class any profounder
political wisdom or more generous public impulses than any other class,
those illusions had long since departed. People were much the same, she
thought, in every class; there was no stratification of either rightness
or righteousness.

He found he could talk to her of his work and aims upon the Fuel
Commission and of the conflict and failure of motives he found in
himself, as freely as he had done to Dr. Martineau and with a surer
confidence of understanding. Perhaps his talks with the doctor had got
his ideas into order and made them more readily expressible than they
would have been otherwise. He argued against the belief that any
class could be good as a class or bad as