There followed a scornful rejection of the passive optimism of the Constitutionalists. Darwin was denounced as a traitor to the cause of progress. "Society," declared Mr. Rossitur, "is perishing from senile decay, awaiting the fabled miracle of evolution." Reform could only follow destruction: destruction of empty loyalties, destruction of cowardly compromise, of a tyranny based on material advantage and sentimentalism that masked rapacity.
Quotations abounded. In his zeal to carry conviction the author rarely expressed an opinion without the support of some famous authority, as if his own cheques would not hold good unless backed by a great financier.
It was all bewildering, and ridiculous and intriguing. Certainly Mary had never encountered anything of the kind before. She became entangled in a labyrinth of obscure reasoning. She was belaboured by pages of savage rhetoric. She stumbled over unfamiliar phrases that recurred here with unremitting urgency—"Living Wage," "Standard of comfort," "Private capitalists." Quite half of it was wholly beyond her comprehension.
"Perhaps I'm tired," she thought. "I shall be able to take it in better to-morrow."
When John returned from the meeting, she rose regretfully and hid the book in the sideboard drawer.
Of course, it was all nonsense; but what amusing nonsense! And somehow, for all its extravagance, it was really rather refreshing. Some grace of youth and burning sincerity relieved its ugliest violence and crudest rhetoric. She wished she could talk to the author. It really was amazing that anyone clever enough to go to Oxford should know so little about farms. Mary would like to explain exactly why one had to look after people who weren't capable of looking after themselves and why one paid labourers' wages instead of every one sharing the profits. It was all so self-evident when one knew anything at all about agriculture. Of course Mr. Rossitur didn't. He was only a boy, whose tempestuousness was too childish to be dangerous, and whose idealism was too unselfconscious to be sentimental. Quite a dear, Mary thought, but terribly ignorant of what things were really like.
"I wonder whatever John will think," she mused as she undressed that night. The prospect of John's inevitable comment was highly entertaining.
Mary had only two days to wait before his birthday, when she handed him her present after the usual ceremonial kiss. My word, at least here was something to make him talk! All day she looked forward eagerly to his reception of the social theories of David Rossitur.
After tea she produced her sewing and, handing John his pipe and the book, sat down to await his verdict.
For three hours she sat silently sewing. The black hands of the clock crawled forward. The room was silent except when, every few minutes, John's hand flicked over another page. It was a quarter past ten.