ll you of what Lancelot was thinking?

But here Vieuxbois spurred in to break a last lance. He had been
very much disgusted with the turn the conversation was taking, for
he considered nothing more heterodox than the notion that the poor
were to educate themselves. In his scheme, of course the clergy and
the gentry were to educate the poor, who were to take down
thankfully as much as it was thought proper to give them: and all
beyond was 'self-will' and 'private judgment,' the fathers of
Dissent and Chartism, Trades'-union strikes, and French Revolutions,
et si qua alia.

'And pray, Mr. Smith, may I ask what limit you would put to
education?'

'The capacities of each man,' said Lancelot. 'If man living in
civilised society has one right which he can demand it is this, that
the State which exists by his labour shall enable him to develop,
or, at least, not hinder his developing, his whole faculties to
their very utmost, however lofty that may be. While a man who might
be an author remains a spade-drudge, or a journeyman while he has
capacities for a master; while any man able to rise in life remains
by social circumstances lower than he is willing to place himself,
that man has a right to complain of the State's injustice and
neglect.'

'Really, I do not see,' said Vieuxbois, 'why people should wish to
rise in life. They had no such self-willed fancy in the good old
times. The whole notion is a product of these modern days--'

He would have said more, but he luckily remembered at whose table he
was sitting.

'I think, honestly,' said Lancelot, whose blood was up, 'that we
gentlemen all run into the same fallacy. We fancy ourselves the
fixed and necessary element in society, to which all others are to
accommodate themselves. "Given the rights of the few rich, to find
the condition of the many poor." It seems to me that other
postulate is quite as fair: "Given the rights of the many poor, to
find the condition of the few rich."'

Lord Minchampstead laughed.

'If you hit us so hard, Mr. Smith, I must really denounce you as a
Communist. Lord Vieuxbois, shall we join the ladies?'

In the drawing-room, poor Lancelot, after rejecting overtures of
fraternity from several young ladies, set himself steadily again
against the wall to sulk and watch Argemone. But this time she
spied in a few minutes his melancholy, moonstruck face, swam up to
him, and said something kind and