"We can none of us tell that;" he answered gravely. "There are some, like Sir William, who insist that when Labour has once started, as it will have started after Sheffield, there will be no holding it. I can not answer for it. I only say that the course Mr. Foley has adopted is distinctly the best for the country. If an obstinate man had been in his place to-day, nothing could have saved you from civil war first and possibly from foreign conquest later." "A month ago," she observed, "you seemed fully prepared for these things." "I was," he admitted. "But you are an Englishman, are you not?" "I am English. I daresay that under other considerations I might even have called myself a patriotic Englishman. As it is, I have very little feeling of that sort. There has been too much self-glorification, and it's the wrong class of people who've revelled in it and enjoyed it. It's a fine thing to die for one's country. It's a shameful thing that that country should grind the life and brains and blood out of a hundred of her children, day by day." A servant brought in tea, delightfully served. There were small yellow china cups, pale tea with a faint, aromatic odour, thick cream, strawberries and cakes. "If only you would appreciate it," she declared, "you are really rather a privileged person. No one has tea with me here." "I do appreciate it," he assured her, "perhaps more than you think." There was a moment's silence. As he was taking his cup from her fingers, their eyes met, and she looked away again almost immediately. "I wish," she said, "that you would tell me more about yourself--what you did in America, what your life has been? You are rather a mysterious person, aren't you?" "In a sense, perhaps, I must seem so," he admitted. "You see, I was an orphan very early. There wasn't any one who cared how I grew up, and I wandered a good deal. The earlier part of my life I was over here--I was at Heidelberg University, bye the bye--and in Paris for two years studying art, of all things! Then something--I don't know what it was--called me to America, and I found it hard to come back. It's a big country, you know, Lady Elisabeth. It gets hold of you. If it hadn't driven me out, I doubt whether I should ever have left it." "But what was it first inspired you with this--well, wouldn't you call it a passion--for championing the cause of the people?" He shook his head. "Born in me, I suppose. I have watched them, lived with them, and then I have been through the whole gamut of Socialistic literature. It is not worth reading, most of it. The essential facts are there to look at, half-a-dozen phrases, a single field of view. It's all very simple."