d read them to you."

Going to the desk, he stood, blowing at the cup.

Hilary turned up the collar of his coat against the night wind which
was visiting the room, and glanced at the empty cup, for he was rather
hungry. He heard a curious sound: Mr. Stone was blowing his own tongue.
In his haste to read, he had drunk too soon and deeply of the cocoa.

"I have burnt my mouth," he said.

Hilary moved hastily towards him: "Badly? Try cold milk, sir."

Mr. Stone lifted the cup.

"There is none," he said, and drank again.

'What would I not give,' thought Hilary, 'to have his singleness of
heart!'

There was the sharp sound of a cup set down. Then, out of a rustling of
papers, a sort of droning rose:

"'The Proletariat--with a cynicism natural to those who really are in
want, and even amongst their leaders only veiled when these attained
a certain position in the public eye--desired indeed the wealth and
leisure of their richer neighbours, but in their long night of struggle
with existence they had only found the energy to formulate their
pressing needs from day to day. They were a heaving, surging sea of
creatures, slowly, without consciousness or real guidance, rising in
long tidal movements to set the limits of the shore a little farther
back, and cast afresh the form of social life; and on its pea-green
bosom '" Mr. Stone paused. "She has copied it wrong," he said; "the
word is 'seagreen.' 'And on its sea-green bosom sailed a fleet of silver
cockle-shells, wafted by the breath of those not in themselves driven by
the wind of need. The voyage of these silver cockle-shells, all heading
across each other's bows, was, in fact, the advanced movement of that
time. In the stern of each of these little craft, blowing at the sails,
was seated a by-product of the accepted system. These by-products we
should now examine."

Mr. Stone paused, and looked into his cup. There were some grounds in
it. He drank them, and went on:

"'The fratricidal principle of the survival of the fittest, which in
those days was England's moral teaching, had made the country one huge
butcher's shop. Amongst the carcasses of countless victims there had
fattened and grown purple many butchers, physically strengthened by the
smell of blood and sawdust. These had begotten many children. Following
out the laws of Nature providing against surfeit, a proportion of these
children were born with a feeling of distaste for blood and sawdust;
many of t