Lord Blackborough's face sharpened to the keenest edge of contempt. "Yes! You are to understand, sir, that, tired of being abused up hill and down dale in your organs for behaving like a sensible man, I am behaving like a fool. Well, men! Labour and Capital have for once met and kissed each other. See that they don't fall out again!"
Mr. Green stood with the papers in his hand for a second then he flung them on the table.
"You fling our own money to us as if we were dogs!" he began hotly.
"Dogs!" echoed Ned Blackborough in the same tone. "I would far liefer give it to the dogs than to you--you men who will have the handling of it. It is you who starved those poor children, not I. Their fathers could keep them in comfort for five-and-twenty shillings a week; you made them stand for out six-and-twenty--as if it mattered--as if money, physical comfort, even freedom, counted for anything in a man's search for happiness. That----." He pulled himself up quivering, feeling the uselessness of speech. "Come, Woods!" he said, "it is time I left this Temple of Mammon! Good-day, gentlemen."
"That is a clear waste of a hundred thousand pounds," mourned Mr. Woods as they crossed the courtyard; "you can't get beyond human nature, my lord. Each man will naturally go for that gold, the cleverest of them will get it, and so capital will re-arise out of its own ashes. You must begin further down--with the children."
"Set up a school, eh? Woods, in which they would be taught the truth--that work and play are merely interchangeable terms for occupation. Hullo! What's up?"
A small crowd of women, mostly carrying babies, but a few of them carrying baskets, stood at the gates blocking the way. Beyond them waited the motor-car, the chauffeur standing at the crank ready to start.
Ned Blackborough walked on until he nearly touched the first woman. She was better dressed than the rest, but who for all that had a coarse, violent face.
"Do you want anything?" he asked quietly. "If you don't, you might let me pass."
"Do we want!" she began in a rhetorical voice. "Yes! we want the bread you have stole from our children."