wer to do mischief
into any hands but hers. A copy of the book, you may be interested to
hear, has already gone to her; and her silence about it warns me that
the epoch it so strenuously makes for is not the one that she desires."

"You are still talking like a book, Max," said the King sarcastically,
wishing to divert discussion for the time being from that which he was
referring to.

"Ah, yes," said Max; "as a bird who mourns his mate. Why, for a while,
should I not indulge my grief? I shall never write another; all I had it
in me to say was said there. In future--though you may hear in my voice
an echo of that lost romance--I am going to be a man not of words but of
deeds."

The King smiled.

"You look incredulous, sir; but I have already startled that Commission
you put me on, and compelled it to include in the scope of its inquiry
things which it did not want to inquire into at all. Believe me, sir; if
we get before us all the evidence that I intend we shall find ourselves
forced into making a very unpopular report--far more unpopular than my
book would have been, and far more subversive of the established order
of things than at present you can have any idea. Even your coats,
sir--exorbitant though their price now is--are going to cost you more as
a result of this Commission, unless we can so arrange that in future a
little less shall be paid for the 'cut' and a little more for the needle
and thread that join the cuttings together. I am going to have it said
in this report of ours--for I have discovered it to be a fact--that the
very clothes which are your daily wear (and mine) are put together by
men and women paid at something less than twopence-half-penny an hour.
And I am going to get it put in that scandalously personal way (your
clothes and mine--the clothes we go to open Parliament in, and set the
fashions in, and when we have worn them some half-dozen times hand on to
charity), I am going to have it thus put that all may be conscious and
ashamed when they see us so exhibiting ourselves, and no longer think a
well-cut coat under modern commercial conditions a fit adjunct for
royalty. That, sir, will do a great deal more harm to 'trade' than my
book would have done. The public conscience does not like to have these
things brought home to royalty itself; we and the 'social evil' are in
no way to be connected with each other, lest it should be seen that we
help to make its ways easy. Only the other day I w