, puts on clean clothes that have been put
out for him, goes down to a good dinner that has been cooked for him,
smokes, reads, learns, and inwardly digests, or else plays cards,
billiards, and acts host till he is sleepy, and so to bed, in a clean,
warm bed, in a clean, fresh room. Is that exaggerated?"

"No; but when you talk of his directing other people, you forget that he
is doing what they couldn't."

"He may be doing what they couldn't; but ordinary directive ability is
not born in a man; it's acquired by habit and training. Suppose fortune
had reversed them at birth, the Gaunt or Tryst would by now have it and
the Malloring would not. The accident that they were not reversed at
birth has given the Malloring a thousandfold advantage."

"It's no joke directing things," muttered Stanley.

"No work is any joke; but I just put it to you: Simply as work, without
taking in the question of reward, would you dream for a minute of
swapping your work with the work of one of your workmen? No. Well,
neither would a Malloring with one of his Gaunts. So that, my boy,
for work which is intrinsically more interesting and pleasurable, the
Malloring gets a hundred to a thousand times more money."

"All this is rank socialism, my dear fellow."

"No; rank truth. Now, to take the life of a Gaunt. He gets up summer and
winter much earlier out of a bed that he cannot afford time or money to
keep too clean or warm, in a small room that probably has not a large
enough window; into clothes stiff with work and boots stiff with clay;
makes something hot for himself, very likely brings some of it to his
wife and children; goes out, attending to his digestion crudely and
without comfort; works with his hands and feet from half past six or
seven in the morning till past five at night, except that twice he stops
for an hour or so and eats simple things that he would not altogether
have chosen to eat if he could have had his will. He goes home to a tea
that has been got ready for him, and has a clean-up without assistance,
smokes a pipe of shag, reads a newspaper perhaps two days old, and goes
out again to work for his own good, in his vegetable patch, or to sit on
a wooden bench in an atmosphere of beer and 'baccy.' And so, dead tired,
but not from directing other people, he drowses himself to early lying
again in his doubtful bed. Is that exaggerated?"

"I suppose not, but he--"

"Has his compensations: Clean conscience--freedom from w