"But all these marriage laws," said a painter who was walking out with the vicarage housemaid and foresaw financial ruin if they got married, "they won't help, as I can see, to give us control of the state."
Dixon told him he must look to the future, to his children, in fact. The painter threw a forward glance at his children, not yet born; it left him cold. Anyhow, if he married Nellie they'd probably die young, from starvation.
But, in the main, Dixon's discourse on democracy was popular. Dixon was a popular speaker with working-men; he had the right touch. But squires did not like him. Captain Ambrose disliked him very much. It was just democracy, and all this socialism, that was spoiling the country.
Mr. Delmer ventured to say that he thought the private and domestic lives of the public ought not to be tampered with.
"Why not?" enquired Stephen Dixon, and Mr. Delmer had not, at the moment, an answer ready. "When everything else is being tampered with," added Dixon. "And surely the more we tamper (if you put it like that) in the interests of progress, the further removed we are from savages."
Mr. Delmer looked puzzled for a moment, then committed himself, without sufficient preliminary thought, to a doubtful statement, "Human love ought to be free," which raised a cheer.
"Free love," Dixon returned promptly, "has never, surely, been advocated by the best thinkers of Church or State," and while Mr. Delmer blushed, partly at his own carelessness, partly at the delicacy of the subject, and partly because Pansy Ponsonby was standing at his elbow, Dixon added, "Love, like anything else, wants regulating, organising, turning to the best uses. Otherwise, we become, surely, no better than the other animals...."
"Isn't he just terribly fierce," observed Pansy in her smiling contralto, to the world at large.
Mr. Delmer said uncomfortably, "You mistake me, sir. I was not advocating lawless love. I am merely maintaining that love—if we must use the word—should not be shackled by laws relating to things which are of less importance than itself, such as the cultivation of the intelligence."
"Is it of less importance?" Dixon challenged him.