hey were paid to men who looked after birds and dogs,
loaded your guns, beat your coverts, or drove you to the shoot, or paid
to men who ploughed and fertilized the land, what did it matter? To
dictate to a man to whom he was to pay wages was, in the last degree,
un-English. Everybody knew the fate which had come, or was coming,
upon capital. It was being driven out of the country by leaps and
bounds--though, to be sure, it still perversely persisted in yielding
every year a larger revenue by way of income tax. And it would be
dastardly to take advantage of land just because it was the only sort
of capital which could not fly the country in times of need. Stanley
himself, though--as became a host--he spoke little and argued not at
all, was distinctly of this faction; and Clara sometimes felt uneasy
lest her efforts to focus at Becket all interest in the land question
should not quite succeed in outweighing the passivity of her husband's
attitude. But, knowing that it is bad policy to raise the whip too soon,
she trusted to her genius to bring him 'with one run at the finish,' as
they say, and was content to wait.

There was universal sympathy with the Mallorings. If a model landlord
like Malloring had trouble with his people, who--who should be immune?
Arson! It was the last word! Felix, who secretly shared Nedda's horror
of the insensate cruelty of flames, listened, nevertheless, to the
jubilation that they had caught the fellow, with profound disturbance.
For the memory of the big laborer seated against the wall, his eyes
haunting round his cell, quarrelled fiercely with his natural abhorrence
of any kind of violence, and his equally natural dislike of what brought
anxiety into his own life--and the life, almost as precious, of his
little daughter. Scarcely a word of the evening's conversation but
gave him in high degree the feeling: How glib all this is, how far from
reality! How fatted up with shell after shell of comfort and security!
What do these people know, what do they realize, of the pressure and
beat of raw life that lies behind--what do even I, who have seen this
prisoner, know? For us it's as simple as killing a rat that eats our
corn, or a flea that sucks our blood. Arson! Destructive brute--lock him
up! And something in Felix said: For order, for security, this may be
necessary. But something also said: Our smug attitude is odious!

He watched his little daughter closely, and several times marked the
co