d. Susan had already dabbed in the disaster of Sir Isaac's
unorganized competitors going to the wall--for charity or the state to
neglect or bandage as it might chance--the figure of that poor little
"Father," moping hopelessly before his "accident" symbolized that; and
now she gave in vivid splotches of allusion, glimpses of the business
machine that had replaced those shattered enterprises and carried Sir
Isaac to the squalid glory of a Liberal honours list,--the carefully
balanced antagonisms and jealousies of the girls and the manageresses,
those manageresses who had been obliged to invest little bunches of
savings as guarantees and who had to account for every crumb and
particle of food stock that came to the branch, and the hunt for cases
and inefficiency by the inspectors, who had somehow to justify a salary
of two hundred a year, not to mention a percentage of the fines they
inflicted.

"There's all that business of the margarine," said Susan. "Every branch
gets its butter under weight,--the water squeezes out,--and every branch
has over weight margarine. Of course the rules say that mixing's
forbidden and if they get caught they go, but they got to pay-in for
that butter, and it's setting a snare for their feet. People who've
never thought to cheat, when they get it like that, day after day, they
cheat, my lady.... And the girls get left food for rations. There's
always trouble, it's against what the rules say, but they get it. Of
course it's against the rules, but what can a manageress do?--if the
waste doesn't fall on them, it falls on her. She's tied there with her
savings.... Such driving, my lady, it's against the very spirit of God.
It makes scoffers point. It makes people despise law and order. There's
Luke, he gets bitterer and bitterer; he says that it's in the Word we
mustn't muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn, but these Stores, he
says, they'd muzzle the ox and keep it hungry and make it work a little
machine, he says, whenever it put down its head in the hope of finding a
scrap...."

So Susan, bright-eyed, flushed and voluble, pleading the cause of that
vague greatness in humanity that would love, that would loiter, that
would think, that would if it could give us art, delight and beauty,
that turns blindly and stumblingly towards joy, towards intervals,
towards the mysterious things of the spirit, against all this sordid
strenuousness, this driving destructive association of hardfisted
peas