money honestly, doesn't he give a fair share of all he gathers to the
poor?" Applebaum asked.

"To the producers, you mean, the men who made his wealth? Not such a
noble portion as you might think. I was in India once, during a famine.
Children lay dead by the wayside, their thin little arms stiff at their
sides. At night when you went by a native hut you heard a baby sobbing
as it pulled at an empty breast, or you listened to that saddest cry in
the world, a mother wailing for her dead child."

"Bad crops?" Billy questioned.

"Thievery!" the Major answered in a tone that made Madame jump at her
distant table, while the three immediate listeners felt as though a bomb
had exploded. Then in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice, as though narrating
a commonplace: "Down at the coast I saw ships laden with grain for
England, loaded by those people who you feel give a fair share of what
they gather to the poor."

"That's like the English!" Kathleen cried, her Irish blood asserting
itself. "They're the oppressors of the world!"

"Nonsense," the Major retorted, "you don't know what you're talking
about. When the English conquered India the natives exchanged one master
for another, that was all. If the native princes and rajahs stole less
than the British, and I don't know that this was the case, it was
stupidity not kindliness that kept them from making a complete job."

"I don't believe they were such hypocrites as the English," Kathleen
muttered.

She felt much aggrieved. Customarily she held the floor and her
listeners either contented themselves with silent dissent or uttered
short, ineffectual protests. To-night a friend, a revolutionist like
herself, characterized her ideas as foolish and nonsensical, while the
audience she was accustomed to routing looked on delighted at her
discomfiture. She was mistaken in her interpretation of Applebaum's
feeling. He was grieved that any one should show her rudeness; but
Hertha, it is to be confessed, was pleased at the turn events were
taking. She looked at the Major for another broadside, but to her
surprise, he nodded acquiescence to Kathleen's last remark.

"You're right about that," he said, "though hypocrisy isn't English, it
belongs to civilization. When you do wrong and know it, but desire to go
on in wrong-doing, if you are a savage you continue without apology. If
you are civilized you begin the process, the slow, evolutionary
process," nodding his head at Applebaum, "of