“Oh, no,” answered Braintree, “a compliment.”
Murrel interposed pacifically. “Why you’re all coming round to my idea; first a coal-heaver, I suppose, and then a chimney-sweep and so on to perfect blackness.”
“But aren’t you a Syndicalist?” asked Olive with extreme severity. Then, after a pause, she added, “What is a Syndicalist?”
“The shortest way of putting it, I should say,” said Braintree, with more consideration, “would be to say that, in our view, the mine ought to belong to the miner.”
“Mine’s mine, in fact,” said Murrel, “fine feudal medieval motto.”
“I think that motto is very modern,” observed Olive a little acidly, “but how would you manage with the miner owning the mine?”
“Ridiculous idea, isn’t it?” said the Syndicalist, “One might as well talk about the painter owning the paint-box.”
Olive rose and walked to the French windows that stood open on the garden; and looked out, frowning. The frown was partly at the Syndicalist, but partly also at some thoughts of her own. After a few minutes’ silence, she stepped out on to the gravel path and walked slowly away. There was a certain restrained rebuke about the action; but Braintree was too hot in his intellectualism to heed it.
“I don’t suppose,” he went on, “that anybody has ever realised how wild and Utopian it is for a fiddler to own his fiddle.”
“Oh, fiddlesticks, you and your fiddle,” cried the impetuous Mr. Archer, “how can a lot of low fellows–”