ed Estelle.

"The colour of a bath sponge," he said, and she pretended despair.

"Oh dear! And I really thought I had seen the dawning of poetry in you,
Ray."

"Merely reflected from yourself, Chicky. Still I'm improving. The
turbine has a poetic side, don't you think?"

"I suppose it has. Science is poetic--at any rate, the history of
science is full of poetry--if you know what poetry means."

"I wish I had more time for such things," he said. "Perhaps I shall
have some day. To be in trade is rather deadening though. There seems so
little to show for all my activities--only hundreds of thousands of
miles of string. In weak moments I sometimes ask myself if, after all,
it is good enough."

"They must be very weak moments, indeed," said Estelle. "Perhaps you'll
tell me how the world could get on without string?"

"I don't know. But you, with all your love of beautiful things, ought to
understand me instead of jumping on me. What is beauty? No two people
feel the same about it, surely? You'd say a poem was beautiful; I'd say
a square cut for four, just out of reach of cover point, was beautiful.
Your father would say, a book on shooting high pheasants was beautiful,
if he agreed with it; John Best would say a good sample of shop twine
was beautiful."

"We should all be right, beauty is in all those things. I can see that.
I can even see that shooting birds with great skill, as father does, is
beautiful--not the slaughter of the bird, which can't be beautiful, but
the way it's done. But those are small things. With the workers you want
to begin at the beginning and show them--what Mister Best knows--that
the beauty of the thing they make depends on it being well and truly
made."

"They're restless."

"Yes; they're reaching out for more happiness, like everybody else."

"I wouldn't back the next generation of capitalists to hold the fort
against labour."

"Perhaps the next generation won't want to," she said. "Perhaps by that
time we shall be educated up to the idea that rich people are quite as
anti-social as poor people. Then we shall do away with both poverty and
riches. To us, educated on the old values, it would come as a shock, but
the generation that is born into such a world would accept it as a
matter of course and not grumble."

He laughed.

"Don't believe it, Chicky. Every generation has its own hawks and eagles
as well as its sheep. The strong will always want the fulness of the
earth and alwa