“Mrs. Blair is a corker!” Edwards announced suddenly. “The best ever! Do you raise many like her in your caste?”
Stacey smiled. “Not so you’d notice it,” he returned drily.
“Well, I’m glad of that. I should hate to find some real reason for the existence of your plutocratic bunch.”
“Oh, you make me tired!” said Stacey wearily. “You talk like a child. At heart you have a kind of idea that the people I know are different from you. You resent it, but you have a secret feeling that they’re superior—Olympians. That’s because—”
But at this point in his attack the telephone bell rang and he lifted the receiver.
“That you, Stacey?” said his father’s voice, and Stacey knew at once that the attempt had failed. “I saw Colin Jeffries about that matter, had a long talk with him. But I couldn’t budge him. Said he’d do anything else in the world for me, but that in the matter of this strike he couldn’t even hear of a compromise. Said he’d be going back on every principle he had if he did. That it had come to a show-down. Was business to be run as an efficient competitive proposition with moderate financial reward, or was it to become a charitable institution with the investors as donators? He made a strong case for his stand—unanswerable logically. All the same . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, I’ve heard those statistics from Edwards and I’ve seen some of the men. It’s not just that they should have to live like that.”
“What did Jeffries say when you pointed that out?”
“Said he was sorry for the men and their wives, very, but that he had to think of the stock-holders also. That they, too, were men and women, though you couldn’t get an employee to see it.”