y, making them pay their thruppence for those wretched stamps. I
believe Mrs. Castor does. How she's got the face to I can't imagine."

"Why, aren't you going to make them pay, Mabel?"

Mabel was quite indignant. "Is it likely? I should hope not!"

"Really? Haven't you been making High and Low pay their share of the
stamps all this time?"

"Of course I've not."

"You've been paying their contribution?"

"Of course I have."

"Well, but Mabel, that's wrong, awfully wrong."

She simply stared at him. "You really are beyond me, Mark. What do you
mean 'wrong'?"

"Well, it's not fair--not fair on the girls--"

"Not fair to pay them more than their wages!"

"No, of course it's not. Don't you see half the idea of the Act is to
help these people to learn thrift and forethought--to learn the wisdom
of putting by for a rainy day. And to encourage their independence. When
you go and pay what they ought to pay, you're simply taking away their
independence."

She gave her sudden burst of laughter. "You're the first person I've
ever heard say that the lower classes want their independence
encouraged. It's just what's wrong with them--independence."

He began to talk with animation. This was one of the things that much
interested him. He seemed to have quite forgotten the origin of the
conversation. "No, it isn't, Mabel--it isn't. That's jolly interesting,
that point. It's their _dependence_ that's wrong with them. They're
nearly all of them absolutely dependent on an employer, and that's bad,
fatal, for anybody. It's the root of the whole trouble with the
less-educated classes, if people would only see it. What they want is
pride in themselves. They just slop along taking what they can get, and
getting so much for nothing--votes and free this, that and the
other--that they don't value it in the least. They're dependent all the
time. What you want to help them to is independence, pride in themselves
and confidence in themselves--that sort of independence. You know, all
this talk that they put up, or that's put up for them, about their right
to this and their right to that--of course you can't have a right to
anything without earning it. That's what they want to be shown, see? And
that's what they want to be given--the chance to earn the right to
things, see? Well, this Insurance Act business--"

She laughed again. "I was beginning to wonder if you were ever coming
back to that."

He noticed nothing deprecatory in her