he
summer day grew hot, they swam in the nude pond. She joined them in the
water, splashing about in a costume of some elaboration and being very
careful not to wet her hair. Then she came and sat with them on the
seat under the big cedar and talked with them in a wrap that was pretty
rather than prudish and entirely unmotherly. And she began a fresh
attack upon him by asking him if he wasn't a Socialist and whether he
didn't want to pull down Chexington and grow potatoes all over the park.

This struck Prothero as an inadequate statement of the Socialist project
and he made an unsuccessful attempt to get it amended.

The engagement thus opened was renewed with great energy at lunch.
Sir Godfrey had returned to London and the inmost aspect of his
fellow-creatures, but the party of three was supplemented by a vague
young lady from the village and an alert agent from the neighbouring
Tentington estate who had intentions about a cottage. Lady Marayne
insisted upon regarding Socialism as a proposal to reinaugurate the
first French Revolution, as an inversion of society so that it would be
bottom upward, as an attack upon rule, order, direction. "And what good
are all these proposals? If you had the poor dear king beheaded,
you'd only get a Napoleon. If you divided all the property up between
everybody, you'd have rich and poor again in a year."

Billy perceived no way of explaining away this version of his Socialism
that would not involve uncivil contradictions--and nobody ever
contradicted Lady Marayne.

"But, Lady Marayne, don't you think there is a lot of disorder and
injustice in the world?" he protested.

"There would be ever so much more if your Socialists had their way."

"But still, don't you think--..."

It is unnecessary even to recapitulate these universal controversies of
our time. The lunch-table and the dinner-table and the general talk of
the house drifted more and more definitely at its own level in the
same direction as the private talk of Prothero and Benham, towards
the antagonism of the privileged few and the many, of the trained
and traditioned against the natural and undisciplined, of aristocracy
against democracy. At the week-end Sir Godfrey returned to bring fresh
elements. He said that democracy was unscientific. "To deny aristocracy
is to deny the existence of the fittest. It is on the existence of the
fittest that progress depends."

"But do our social conditions exalt the fittest?" asked