Everybody at table started. Lord Maxwell looked at Miss Raeburn, his mouth twitching over the humour of his sister's dismay. Well! this was a forcible young woman: was Aldous the kind of man to be able to deal conveniently with such eyes, such emotions, such a personality?
Suddenly Lady Winterbourne's deep voice broke in:
"I never could say it half so well as that, Miss Boyce; but I agree with you. I may say that I have agreed with you all my life."
The girl turned to her, grateful and quivering.
"At the same time," said Lady Winterbourne, relapsing with a long breath from tragic emphasis into a fluttering indecision equally characteristic, "as you say, one is inconsistent. I was poor once, before Edward came to the title, and I did not at all like it—not at all. And I don't wish my daughters to marry poor men; and what I should do without a maid or a carriage when I wanted it, I cannot imagine. Edward makes the most of these things. He tells me I have to choose between things as they are, and a graduated income tax which would leave nobody—not even the richest—more than four hundred a year."
"Just enough, for one of those little houses on your station road," said Lord Maxwell, laughing at her. "I think you might still have a maid."
"There, you laugh," said Lady Winterbourne, vehemently: "the men do. But I tell you it is no laughing matter to feel that your heart and conscience have gone over to the enemy. You want to feel with your class, and you can't. Think of what used to happen in the old days. My grandmother, who was as good and kind a woman as ever lived, was driving home through our village one evening, and a man passed her, a labourer who was a little drunk, and who did not take off his hat to her. She stopped, made her men get down and had him put in the stocks there and then—the old stocks were still standing on the village green. Then she drove home to her dinner, and said her prayers no doubt that night with more consciousness than usual of having done her duty. But if the power of the stocks still remained to us, my dear friend"—and she laid her thin old woman's hand, flashing with diamonds, on Lord Maxwell's arm—"we could no longer do it, you or I. We have lost the sense of right in our place and position—at least I find I have. In the old days if there was social disturbance the upper class could put it down with a strong hand."
"So they would still," said Lord Maxwell, drily, "if there were violence. Once let it come to any real attack on property, and you will see where all these Socialist theories will be. And of course it will not be we—not the landowners or the capitalists—who will put it down. It will be the hundreds and thousands of people with something to lose—a few pounds in a joint-stock mill, a house of their own built through a co-operative store, an acre or two of land stocked by their own savings—it is they, I am afraid, who will put Miss Boyce's friends down so far as they represent any real attack on property—and brutally, too, I fear, if need be."
"I dare say," exclaimed Marcella, her colour rising again. "I never can see how we Socialists are to succeed. But how can any one rejoice in it? How can any one wish that the present state of things should go on? Oh! the horrors one sees in London. And down here, the cottages, and the starvation wages, and the ridiculous worship of game, and then, of course, the poaching—"
Miss Raeburn pushed back her chair with a sharp noise. But her brother was still peeling his pear, and no one else moved. Why did he let such talk go on? It was too unseemly.