orry--fresh air,
all the rest of it! I know. Clean conscience granted, but so has your
Malloring, it would seem. Freedom from worry--yes, except when a pair of
boots is wanted, or one of the children is ill; then he has to make up
for lost time with a vengeance. Fresh air--and wet clothes, with a
good chance of premature rheumatism. Candidly, which of those two lives
demands more of the virtues on which human life is founded--courage and
patience, hardihood and self-sacrifice? And which of two men who have
lived those two lives well has most right to the word 'superior'?"

Stanley dropped the Review and for fully a minute paced the room without
reply. Then he said:

"Felix, you're talking flat revolution."

Felix, who, faintly smiling, had watched him up and down, up and down
the Turkey carpet, answered:

"Not so. I am by no means a revolutionary person, because with all the
good-will in the world I have been unable to see how upheavals from the
bottom, or violence of any sort, is going to equalize these lives or
do any good. But I detest humbug, and I believe that so long as you and
your Mallorings go on blindly dosing yourselves with humbug about duty
and superiority, so long will you see things as they are not. And until
you see things as they are, purged of all that sickening cant, you will
none of you really move to make the conditions of life more and ever
more just. For, mark you, Stanley, I, who do not believe in revolution
from the bottom, the more believe that it is up to us in honour to
revolutionize things from the top!"

"H'm!" said Stanley; "that's all very well; but the more you give the
more they want, till there's no end to it."

Felix stared round that room, where indeed one was all body.

"By George," he said, "I've yet to see a beginning. But, anyway, if you
give in a grudging spirit, or the spirit of a schoolmaster, what can
you expect? If you offer out of real good-will, so it is taken." And
suddenly conscious that he had uttered a constructive phrase, Felix cast
down his eyes, and added:

"I am going to my clean, warm bed. Good night, old man!"

When his brother had taken up his candlestick and gone, Stanley,
uttering a dubious sound, sat down on the lounge, drank deep out of his
tumbler, and once more took up his Review.

CHAPTER VII

The next day Stanley's car, fraught with Felix and a note from Clara,
moved swiftly along the grass-bordered roads toward Joyfields. Lying
back on