feel with your
class, and you can't. Think of what used to happen in the old days. My
grandmother, who was as good and kind a woman as ever lived, was driving
home through our village one evening, and a man passed her, a labourer
who was a little drunk, and who did not take off his hat to her. She
stopped, made her men get down and had him put in the stocks there and
then--the old stocks were still standing on the village green. Then she
drove home to her dinner, and said her prayers no doubt that night with
more consciousness than usual of having done her duty. But if the power
of the stocks still remained to us, my dear friend"--and she laid her
thin old woman's hand, flashing with diamonds, on Lord Maxwell's
arm--"we could no longer do it, you or I. We have lost the sense of
_right_ in our place and position--at least I find I have. In the old
days if there was social disturbance the upper class could put it down
with a strong hand."

"So they would still," said Lord Maxwell, drily, "if there were
violence. Once let it come to any real attack on property, and you will
see where all these Socialist theories will be. And of course it will
not be _we_--not the landowners or the capitalists--who will put it
down. It will be the hundreds and thousands of people with something to
lose--a few pounds in a joint-stock mill, a house of their own built
through a co-operative store, an acre or two of land stocked by their
own savings--it is they, I am afraid, who will put Miss Boyce's friends
down so far as they represent any real attack on property--and brutally,
too, I fear, if need be."

"I dare say," exclaimed Marcella, her colour rising again. "I never can
see how we Socialists are to succeed. But how can any one _rejoice_ in
it? How can any one _wish_ that the present state of things should go
on? Oh! the horrors one sees in London. And down here, the cottages, and
the starvation wages, and the ridiculous worship of game, and then, of
course, the poaching--"

Miss Raeburn pushed back her chair with a sharp noise. But her brother
was still peeling his pear, and no one else moved. Why did he let such
talk go on? It was too unseemly.

Lord Maxwell only laughed. "My dear young lady," he said, much amused,
"are you even in the frame of mind to make a hero of a poacher?
Disillusion lies that way!--it does indeed. Why--Aldous!--I have been
hearing such tales from Westall this morning. I stopped at Corbett's
farm a minute or