and popularity of the International Bread and Cake Stores.
The unsatisfied demands of that bright journalistic enterprise, _The
London Lion_, lay near the roots of the trouble. _The London Lion_ had
stirred it up. But it was only too evident that _The London Lion_ had
merely given a voice and form and cohesion to long smouldering
discontents.

Susan's account of the matter had that impartiality which comes from
intellectual incoherence, she hadn't so much a judgment upon the whole
as a warring mosaic of judgments. It was talking upon Post Impressionist
lines, talking in the manner of Picasso. She had the firmest conviction
that to strike against employment, however ill-paid or badly
conditioned, was a disgraceful combination of folly, ingratitude and
general wickedness, and she had an equally strong persuasion that the
treatment of the employees of the International Bread and Cake Stores
was such as no reasonably spirited person ought to stand. She blamed her
sister extremely and sympathized with her profoundly, and she put it all
down in turn to _The London Lion_, to Sir Isaac, and to a small
round-faced person called Babs Wheeler, who appeared to be the strike
leader and seemed always to be standing on tables in the branches, or
clambering up to the lions in Trafalgar Square, or being cheered in the
streets.

But there could be no mistaking the quality of Sir Isaac's
"International" organization as Susan's dabs of speech shaped it out. It
was indeed what we all of us see everywhere about us, the work of the
base energetic mind, raw and untrained, in possession of the keen
instruments of civilization, the peasant mind allied and blended with
the Ghetto mind, grasping and acquisitive, clever as a Norman peasant or
a Jew pedlar is clever, and beyond that outrageously stupid and ugly. It
was a new view and yet the old familiar view of her husband, but now she
saw him not as little eager eyes, a sharp nose, gaunt gestures and a
leaden complexion, but as shops and stores and rules and cash registers
and harsh advertisements and a driving merciless hurry to get--to get
anything and everything, money, monopoly, power, prominence, whatever
any other human being seemed to admire or seemed to find desirable, a
lust rather than a living soul. Now that her eyes were at last opened
Lady Harman, who had seen too little heretofore, now saw too much; she
saw all that she had not seen, with an excess of vision, monstrous,
caricature