can he?" Arnold asked. "There is a policeman within a few yards
of him. The law stands always in the way."

"The law!" she repeated, scornfully. "It is a pleasant word, that,
which you use. The law is the artificial bogey made by the men who
possess to keep those others in the gutter. And they tell me that
there are half a million of them in London--and they suffer--like
that. Could your courts of justice hold half a million law-breakers
who took an overcoat from a better clad man, or the price of a meal
from a sleek passer-by, or bread from the shop which taunted their
hunger? They do not know their strength, those who suffer."

Arnold looked at her in sheer amazement. It was surely a strange
woman who spoke! There was no sympathy in her face or tone. The idea
of giving alms to the man seemed never to have occurred to her. She
spoke with clouded face, as one in anger.

"Don't you believe," he asked, "in the universal principle, the
survival of the fittest? Where there is wealth there must be
poverty."

She laughed.

"Change your terms," she suggested; "where there are robbers there
must be victims. But one may despise the victims all the same. One
may find their content, or rather their inaction, ignoble."

"Generally speaking, it is the industrious who prosper," he
affirmed.

She shook her head.

"If that were so, all would be well," she declared. "As a matter of
fact, it is entirely an affair of opportunity and temperament."

"Why, you are a socialist," he said. "You should come and talk to my
friend Isaac."

"I am not a socialist because I do not care one fig about others,"
she objected. "It is only myself I think of."

"If you do not sympathize with laws, you at least recognize morals?"

She laughed gayly, leaning back against the dark green upholstery
and showing her flawless teeth; her long, narrow eyes with their
seductive gleam flashed into his. A lighter spirit possessed her.

"Not other people's," she declared. "I have my own code and I live
by it. As for you,--"

She paused. Her sudden fit of gayety seemed to pass.

"As for me?" he murmured.

"I am a little conscience-stricken," she said slowly. "I think I
ought to have left you where you were. I am not at all sure that you
would not have been happier. You are a very nice boy, Mr. Arnold
Chetwode, much too good for that stuffy little office in Tooley
Street, but I do not know whether it is really for your good if one
is inclined to try