There is now a great buzz of voices everywhere in the rooms; people are so very glad to have the muzzle off after an hour’s silence; he cannot doubt, as that murmur and trill of conversation run all round him, that he has bored them all excruciatingly. “They have no minds!” he thinks, bitterly. “We sell a bare score of copies a month of the _Age to Come_, and the _Dustcart_, with its beastly ribaldry and social scandals, sells sixty-five thousand!” “Do you mean to say, Wilfrid,” asks his aunt, eating a caviare sandwich, “that anybody would pay taxes if they were not obliged?” “Do not people, urged by conscience, send arrears, unasked, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer?” “Well, they do certainly now and then. But they must be very oddly constituted people.” “Is conscience an eccentricity?” His aunt does not argue, she only shakes her head. “I can’t believe anybody would pay taxes if they weren’t obliged.” “But they do. There are these instances in the papers. If moral feeling in the public were acute and universal, as it ought to be, every public duty would be fulfilled with promptitude and without pressure.” The old duke nods very expressively. “Your aunt’s right,” he mumbles. “Conscience-money can only come from cranks!” “Come and dine with us, Wilfrid,” says his aunt; “we never see you now. I assure you a good dinner changes the colour of political opinions in a wonderful degree. I am dreadfully afraid that you have been living on boiled soles and carrot fritters.” Bertram smiles slightly. “The carrot fritters; not the soles. I am a vegetarian.” “But we are justified in being carnivorous,” says Southwold, very eagerly. “Individualism justifies us.” Marlow repeats with emphasis: “We are justified in being carnivorous. Individualism justifies us.” “Certainly,” says Bertram, with uncivil sarcasm. “The crocodile has a right to its appetites, and the cur to its vomit. Solomon said so.” “Am I the crocodile or the cur?” asks Southwold. “Do you keep Critchett on carrot fritters?” asks Marlow, “and what does he have to drink? Hot water? Hot water is, I believe, the beverege which nowadays accompanies high thinking.” “And how do you reconcile your conscience and your creeds to keeping a Critchett at all?” repeats Lady Jane. Bertram replies with distant chillness and proud humility: “The leaven of long habit is hard to get rid of; I entirely agree with you that I am in the wrong. To have a servant at all is an offence to humanity; it is an impertinence to the brotherhood of our common mortality.” “Don’t be afraid,” says Southwold, grimly, “our brothers and sisters in the servants’ halls pay us out for the outrage; they take away our characters, read our correspondence, and pocket twenty per cent. on all our bills.”