Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/458

450 the monstrous denial of life to the many by the fortunate few. He talked at Lettie most flagrantly.

“Of course,” she said, “I have read Mr. Wells and Mr. Shaw, and even Niel Lyons and a Dutchman—what is his name, Querido? But what can I do? I think the rich have as much misery as the poor, and of quite as deadly a sort. What can I do? It is a question of life and the development of the human race. Society and its regulations is not a sort of drill that endless Napoleons have forced on us: it is the only way we have yet found of living together.”

“Pah!” said he, “that is rank cowardice. It is feeble and futile to the last degree.”

“We can’t grow consumption-proof in a generation, nor can we grow poverty-proof.”

“We can begin to take active measures,” he replied contemptuously.

“We can all go into a sanatorium and live miserably and dejectedly warding off death,” she said, “but life is full of goodliness for all that.”

“It is fuller of misery,” he said.

Nevertheless, she had shaken him. She still kept her astonishing power of influencing his opinions. All his passion, and heat, and rude speech, analysed out, was only his terror at her threatening of his life-interest.

She was rather piqued by his rough treatment of her, and by his contemptuous tone. Moreover, she could never quite let him be. She felt a driving force which impelled her almost against her will to interfere in his life. She invited him to dine with them at Highclose. He was now quite possible. He