itation.

"Eh, eh, you go too fast! Eiran, to do him justice, is not a graduate
in peculation. At worst, he is only the sort of fool one's cousins
ordinarily are."

The trousered lady walked to and fro for a while, with the impatience
of a caged lioness. "I perceive I must go more deeply into matters,"
Miss Ogle remarked, and, with that habitual gesture which he fondly
recognized, brushed back a straying lock of hair. "In any event," she
continued, "you cannot with reason deny that the world's wealth is
inequitably distributed?"

"Madam," Mr. Sheridan returned, "as a member of Parliament, I have
necessarily made it a rule never to understand political economy. It
is as apt as not to prove you are selling your vote to the wrong side
of the House, and that hurts one's conscience."

"Ah, that is because you are a man. Men are not practical. None of
you has ever dared to insist on his opinion about anything until he had
secured the cowardly corroboration of a fact or so to endorse him. It
is a pity. Yet, since through no fault of yours your sex is invariably
misled by its hallucinations as to the importance of being rational, I
will refrain from logic and statistics. In a word, I simply inform you
that I am a member of the League of Philanthropic Larcenists."

"I had not previously heard of this organization," said Mr. Sheridan,
and not without suspecting his response to be a masterpiece in the
inadequate.

"Our object is the benefit of society at large," Miss Ogle explained;
"and our obstacles so far have been, in chief, the fetish of
proprietary rights and the ubiquity of the police."

And with that she seated herself and told him of the league's inception
by a handful of reflective persons, admirers of Rousseau and converts
to his tenets, who were resolved to better the circumstances of the
indigent. With amiable ardor Miss Ogle explained how from the petit
larcenies of charity-balls and personally solicited subscriptions the
league had mounted to an ampler field of depredation; and through what
means it now took toll from every form of wealth unrighteously
acquired. Divertingly she described her personal experiences in the
separation of usurers, thieves, financiers, hereditary noblemen,
popular authors, and other social parasites, from the ill-got profits
of their disreputable vocations. And her account of how, on the
preceding Tuesday, she, single-handed, had robbed Sir Alexander
McRae--who then e