He gruffly replied that if they had done anything like as much as she said—which, he begged her pardon, but he didn't believe—it was done for the landlords' own purposes, either to buy off public opinion, or just for show and aggrandisement. People who had prize pigs and prize cattle must have prize cottages of course—"with a race of slaves inside 'em!"
Marcella, bright-eyed, erect, her thin right hand hanging over her knee, went avengingly into facts—the difference between landlords' villages and "open" villages; the agrarian experiments made by different great landlords; the advantage to the community, even from the Socialist point of view of a system which had preserved the land in great blocks, for the ultimate use of the State, as compared with a system like the French, which had for ever made Socialism impossible.
Hallin's astonishment almost swept away his weariness.
"Where in the world did she get it all from, and is she standing on her head or am I?"
After an animated little debate, in which Bennett and the two workmen joined, while Wilkins sat for the most part in moody, contemptuous silence, and Marcella, her obstinacy roused, carried through her defence of the landlords with all a woman's love of emphasis and paradox, everybody rose simultaneously to say good-night.
"You ought to come and lead a debate down at our Limehouse club," said Bennett pleasantly to Marcella, as she held out her hand to him; "you'd take a lot of beating."
"Yet I'm a Venturist, you know," she said, laughing; "I am."
He shook his head, laughed too, and departed.
When the four had gone, Marcella turned upon Hallin.
"Are there many of these Labour members like that?"