ce and a
stock of good cigars.

Cairns was happy, and Victoria labouring lightly for large profits, was
contented too. Theirs were lazy lives, for Cairns was a man who could
loaf. He loafed so successfully that he did not even think of
interfering with Victoria's reading. She now read steadily and
voraciously; she eschewed novels, fearing the influence of sentiment.
'It will be time for sentiment by and by,' she sometimes told herself.
Meanwhile she armoured her heart and sharpened her wits. The earlier
political opinions which had formed in her mind under the pressure of
toil remained unchanged but did not develop. She recognised herself as a
parasite and almost gloried in it. She evolved as a system of philosophy
that one's conduct in life is a matter of alternatives. Nothing was good
and nothing was evil; things were better than others or worse and there
was an end of her morality. Victoria had no patience with theories. One
day, much to Cairns surprise, she violently flung Ingersoll's essays
into the fender.

'Steady on,' said Cairns, 'steady on, old girl.'

'Such rot,' she snarled.

'Hear, hear,' said Cairns, picking up the book and looking at its title.
'Serve you right for reading that sort of stuff. I can't make you out,
Vic.'

Victoria looked at him with a faint smile, but refused to assign a cause
for her anger. In fact she had suddenly been irritated by Ingersoll's
definition of morality. 'Perceived obligation,' she thought. 'And I
don't perceive any obligation!' She consoled herself suddenly with the
thought that her amorality was a characteristic of the superman.

The superman preoccupied her now and then. He was a good subject for
speculation because imponderable and inexistent. The nearest approach
she could think of was a cross between an efficient colonial governor
and a latter-day prophet. She believed quite sincerely that the day must
come when children of the light must be born, capable of ruling and of
keeping the law. She saw very well too that their production did not lie
with an effete aristocracy any more than with a dirty and drunken
democracy; probably they would be neo-plutocrats, men full of ambition,
lusting for power and yet imbued with a spirit of icy justice. Her
earliest tendency had been towards an idealistic socialism. Burning with
her own wrongs and touched by the angelic wing of sympathy, she had seen
in the communisation of wealth the only means of curbing the evils it
had