"It'll have to come," said Vernon Prideaux to Kitty Grammont at lunch. They were lunching at one of those underground resorts about which, as Kitty said, you never know, some being highly respectable, while others are not. Kitty, with her long-lashed, mossy eyes and demure expression, looked and felt at home among divans for two, screens, powdered waitresses, and rose-shaded lights; she had taken Prideaux there for fun, because among such environment he looked a stranger and pilgrim, angular, fastidious, whose home was above. Kitty liked to study her friends in different lights, even rose-shaded ones, and especially one who, besides being a friend, was her departmental superior, and a coming, even come, young man of exceptional brilliance, who might one day be ruling the country.
"If it does," said Kitty, "we shall have to go, that's all. No more compulsion is going to be stood at present. Nothing short of another war, with a military dictatorship and martial law, will save us."
"We stood compulsory education when there was no war," Prideaux pointed out. "We've stood vaccination, taxation, every conceivable form of interference with what we are pleased to call our liberty. This is no worse; it's the logical outcome of State government of the individual. Little by little, precept upon precept, line upon line, these things grow, till we're a serf state without realising it.... After all, why not? What most people mean by freedom would be a loathsome condition; freedom to behave like animals or lunatics, to annoy each other and damage the State. What's the sense of it? Human beings aren't up to it, that's the fact."
"I quite agree with you," said Kitty. "Only the weak point is that hardly any human beings are up to making good laws for the rest, either. We shall slip up badly over this Mind Training Act, if we ever get it through; it will be as full of snags as the Mental Progress Act. We shall have to take on a whole extra Branch to deal with the exemptions alone. Chester's clever, but he's not clever enough to make a good Act. No one is.... By the way, Vernon, you nearly told me something the other day about Chester's category. You might quite tell me now, as we're in the Raid Shelter and not in the Office."
"Did I? It was only that I heard he was uncertificated for marriage. He's got a brother and a twin sister half-witted. I suppose he collared all the brains that were going in his family."
"He would, of course, if he could. He's selfish."
"Selfish," Prideaux was doubtful. "If you can call such a visionary and idealist selfish."
"Visionaries and idealists are always selfish. Look at Napoleon, and Wilhelm II, as Mr. Delmer would say. Visions and ideals are the most selfish things there are. People go about wrapped in them, and keep themselves so warm that they forget that other people need ordinary clothes.... So the Minister is uncertificated.... Well, I'm going up to Regent Street to buy a birthday present for Pansy and cigarettes for myself."
"I must get back," said Prideaux. "I've a Leeds Manufacturers' deputation coming to see me at 2.30 about their men's wages. Leeds workmen, apparently, don't let the Mental Progress Act weigh on them at all; they go calmly ahead with their uncertificated marriages, and then strike for higher wages in view of the taxable family they intend to produce. These fellows coming to-day have got wind of the new agreement with the cutlers and want one like it. I've got to keep them at arm's length."
He emerged above ground, breathed more freely, and walked briskly back to the Ministry. Kitty went to Regent Street, and did not get back to the office until 3.15.