"You mean I haven't any right to call you to account," said the old man placidly. "But I don't do it because you're my son—but because you're a strong man that was born of us and ought to have stayed with us."
"Us? You mean I ought to have been a day-labourer?... You're a fanatic, Dad.... If you were so anxious to have me go the right way, why didn't you stay and train me up?"
"It was weakness, I know, but, as I told you, I couldn't stand your mother, God rest her soul.... But of course I didn't see as much then as I do now. I've picked up some education, I've studied Marx and the Internationalists...."
"And you're for revolution. I see. But it won't come, not in this country, not anyway in your lifetime or mine, and then only slowly, by degrees.... Oh, I've looked into those things as well as you. Social questions interest me. I see the battle of opposing forces, and I'm on your side too, on the side of the advance, as I see it. But—it won't come by a sudden blow—not here. Little by little, as a man's frame changes. This country's built on the English model, little as you may like it, slow to change but yet changing.... And that's where I come in. Don't you see the cause needs a friend at court? You can batter away on the outside as much as you like, but you need somebody inside!"
"Maybe.... That wasn't what made you want to get inside, though, was it, Larry?" said the old man cynically.
"Oh, I don't know.... I don't know why I wanted to."
Laurence stood up, stretching his arms with a look of nervous fatigue.
"I promised the boys a game of billiards—come on up, will you?"
"All right, all right."
Laurence stood a moment with his back to the fire, looking about the room. Its length on two sides was filled nearly to the ceiling with books. There was Judge Baxter's private library in its stately bindings, and many of his law-books, huge bound volumes of reports, "commonplace" books filled with his neat crabbed writing, ponderous commentaries in calf. Laurence had done a good deal of work in this room....