empts here and there, half of the country poor of England have been
re-housed in our generation by these same landlords--no fuss about
it--and rents for five-roomed cottages, somewhere about one and
fourpence a week!"

Hallin swung his chair round and looked at the speaker--amazed!

Wilkins also stared at her under his eyebrows. He did not like
women--least of all, ladies.

He gruffly replied that if they had done anything like as much as she
said--which, he begged her pardon, but he didn't believe--it was done
for the landlords' own purposes, either to buy off public opinion, or
just for show and aggrandisement. People who had prize pigs and prize
cattle must have prize cottages of course--"with a race of slaves
inside 'em!"

Marcella, bright-eyed, erect, her thin right hand hanging over her knee,
went avengingly into facts--the difference between landlords' villages
and "open" villages; the agrarian experiments made by different great
landlords; the advantage to the community, even from the Socialist point
of view of a system which had preserved the land in great blocks, for
the ultimate use of the State, as compared with a system like the
French, which had for ever made Socialism impossible.

Hallin's astonishment almost swept away his weariness.

"Where in the world did she get it all from, and is she standing on her
head or am I?"

After an animated little debate, in which Bennett and the two workmen
joined, while Wilkins sat for the most part in moody, contemptuous
silence, and Marcella, her obstinacy roused, carried through her defence
of the landlords with all a woman's love of emphasis and paradox,
everybody rose simultaneously to say good-night.

"You ought to come and lead a debate down at our Limehouse club," said
Bennett pleasantly to Marcella, as she held out her hand to him; "you'd
take a lot of beating."

"Yet I'm a Venturist, you know," she said, laughing; "I _am_."

He shook his head, laughed too, and departed.

When the four had gone, Marcella turned upon Hallin.

"Are there many of these Labour members like _that_?"

Her tone was still vibrating and sarcastic.

"He's not much of a talker, our Nehemiah," said Hallin, smiling; "but he
has the most extraordinary power as a speaker over a large popular
audience that I have ever seen. The man's honesty is amazing,--it's his
tempers and his jealousies get in his way. You astonished him; but, for
the matter of that, you astonished Frank and