od work. You are preaching revolt against
work--class hatred and discontent."

"Do you believe in non-resistance?"

"No."

"Do you believe in Midas, king of gold, swelled up with power, sitting
smiling on the throne he has forced others to build for him, and saying,
'I am not as other men are'?"

"No. But I believe in work. You mustn't take it out of a man, that
certainty that his own work is the greatest privilege he's got. Oh, you
mustn't do that!"

There it was again, his hungry worship of achievement. It might even
have seemed to him that oppression was not much to bear if, at the same
time, a man had the glory of setting his hand to something and seeing it
prosper. MacLeod, who knew something about his life, but nothing of its
inward processes, began to feel that here was more than at first
appeared, and answered rather temperately,--

"I don't believe you know much about the general conditions under which
work is done. Work means to you Peter's painting a picture. Let it mean,
for example, a great many Peters in a mine delving all day for some smug
capitalist who wants to endow monuments to himself and get his children
into society. What then?"

What then, indeed? Osmond could not answer; but a moment later he said
again, tenaciously,--

"I don't want you to destroy the idea of good work."

"Well, now!" MacLeod spoke impatiently. He realized that here was not a
man whom his torrent of bloody facts would move, but who demanded also a
more persuasive rhetoric. "Well, now, you acknowledge the world is
upside down. Shall we leave it so?"

Osmond shook his head dumbly.

"Shall we say the great scheme counteracts its own abuses, and we won't
interfere? When an empire gets sufficiently corrupt, it tumbles apart of
its own rottenness? Or when we see just cause, shall we go to war?"

"Grannie has the whole secret of it in her hand." This he said
involuntarily, for he had no idea of talking to MacLeod about grannie.
But the subject had passed beyond their predilections of what was best
to say. "Science won't do it--war won't do it. Religion will."

"Ah! You are an enthusiast."

"No. But there is something beyond force and beyond reason."

"Religion, you mean."

"You can call it that. It is what has made that old woman up there at
the house live every day of her life as if she were the
multi-millionaire of the universe--without a thought of herself, without
a doubt that there is an inexhaustible reservoi