e"--stake in the country I suppose--if he would take thought
and mend. The reformation would have to be a drastic one, nothing less
than a complete change of his habits, character and opinions. But such a
thing was not wholly impossible. That was very much what Gorman thought
about me.

Next to Irish landlords Gorman disliked financiers more than any other
people in the world. He did not, by his own confession, know anything
about them; but he had got into touch with a group of journalists in
London which specialises in abuse of the class.

Gorman repeated all the stock arguments to me and illuminated the
subject with some very well worn apologues.

"A financier," he said, "is a bloated spider, which sits in a murky den
spinning webs and sucks the life-blood of its victims."

I wondered how Ascher would like this kind of talk if he ever joined our
party.

There was not, of course, the same note of personal bitterness in
Gorman's condemnation of financiers which I noticed in his attacks on
landlords. He had learned to hate my class during the impressionable
years of childhood. He had only found out about financiers when he was a
grown man. And no one, not even a convert to a new faith, ever believes
anything with real intensity except what he was taught before he was
eight years old. But it was not to be expected that Ascher would be as
patient as I was, even if the abuse with which Gorman assailed his class
lacked something of the conviction with which he attacked me.

I asked Gorman one evening why, holding the opinions he did, he had
chosen as his table mates a banker and an unrepentant landlord. He had
a whole shipload of passengers to choose from, most of them, no doubt
believers in democracy, some of them perhaps even socialists, the kind
of socialists who travel first class on crack Cunard steamers. He seemed
surprised at the question and did not answer me at once. An hour or so
after we had passed away from the subject he returned to it suddenly and
explained that it was necessary to distinguish between individuals
and the classes to which they belong. A class, so I understood, may be
objectionable and dangerous in every way though the men who form it are
delightful.

"Take the Irish priests, for instance," he said. "The minute we get Home
Rule, we'll----"

He paused significantly.

"Deal with them?" I suggested.

He nodded with an emphasis which was positively vicious.

"All the same," he said, "th