asses, and I told her I was persuaded, from
various things I had noticed, that a lot of them were frightfully hard
up. And with that she started off to show whose fault it was, by the
Socratic method."

"Entertaining?"

"A little. I did not get all my answers right. For instance, when she
asked, 'Who sends the members of Parliament to Westminster?' I answered
her, 'The governors of the young ones and the wives of the others.'
And when she said that was wrong--I don't remember Socrates ever saying
bluntly that an answer was wrong--I said I supposed she referred to the
Evil One. It was very dull of me, of course, and it obliged her to
dictate the right solution.

"Afterwards she threw over teaching me anything, and explained to me
all about her Movements. At least, I got really interested in her
Movements. One thing she said struck me very much, though it could
hardly be called novel. It was that the fads of one age were the
fashions of the next; that while the majority of people were engaged in
their little present-day chores, persons like herself are making the
laws and preparing the customs for the generation to follow."

"Poor generations to follow!" I said.

"Yes, but there is a lot of truth in it; and do you know there flashed
upon me all at once a great theory, the Theory of the Perpetual
Discomfort of Humanity. Just let me explain it to you, George," he
said, bringing himself round so that his legs hung over the arm of his
chair. "I think you will see I have made a very great discovery, gone
to the root of the whole of this bother of reform movement, advancement
of humanity, and the rest of it." He sucked his cigar for a moment.
"Each age," he said, "has its own ideals of what constitutes human
happiness."

"A very profound observation," said I.

"Looking down the vista of history, one may generalise and say that we
see human beings continually troubled by the conditions under which
they live. I can think of no time in the world when there was not some
Question or other getting fussed about: at one time episcopal celibacy,
at another time the Pict and Scot problem, and so on. Always a
crumpled rose-leaf. Hence reform movements. Now, reforms move slowly,
and by the time these reforms come about, the people whom they would
have made happy, and who fussed and encountered dislike and satire and
snubbing, and burning and boiling in oil, and suchlike discouragements,
for the sake of them, were dea