er second was dead; it would
seem that hers were the only sacrifices the war had yet extorted from
any one. She spoke as though it gave her the sole right to criticise the
war or claim compensation for the war.

Her incurable propensity to split the country, to make mischievous
accusations against classes and districts and public servants, was
having full play. She did her best to provoke Mr. Britling into a
dispute, and throw some sort of imputation upon his patriotism as
distinguished from her own noisy and intolerant conceptions of
"loyalty."

She tried him first with conscription. She threw out insults at the
shirkers and the "funk classes." All the middle-class people clung on to
their wretched little businesses, made any sort of excuse....

Mr. Britling was stung to defend them. "A business," he said acidly,
"isn't like land, which waits and grows rich for its owner. And these
people can't leave ferrety little agents behind them when they go off to
serve. Tens of thousands of middle-class men have ruined themselves and
flung away every prospect they had in the world to go to this war."

"And scores of thousands haven't!" said Lady Frensham. "They are the men
I'm thinking of."...

Mr. Britling ran through a little list of aristocratic stay-at-homes
that began with a duke.

"And not a soul speaks to them in consequence," she said.

She shifted her attack to the Labour people. They would rather see the
country defeated than submit to a little discipline.

"Because they have no faith in the house of lawyers or the house of
landlords," said Mr. Britling. "Who can blame them?"

She proceeded to tell everybody what she would do with strikers. She
would give them "short shrift." She would give them a taste of the
Prussian way--homoeopathic treatment. "But of course old vote-catching
Asquith daren't--he daren't!" Mr. Britling opened his mouth and said
nothing; he was silenced. The men in khaki listened respectfully but
ambiguously; one of the younger ladies it seemed was entirely of Lady
Frensham's way of thinking, and anxious to show it. The good lady having
now got her hands upon the Cabinet proceeded to deal faithfully with its
two-and-twenty members. Winston Churchill had overridden Lord Fisher
upon the question of Gallipoli, and incurred terrible responsibilities.
Lord Haldane--she called him "Tubby Haldane"--was a convicted traitor.
"The man's a German out and out. Oh! what if he hasn't a drop of German
bl