“And my chain,” says Lord Southwold, touching a steel one, “was my poor old Hector’s collar, and I wear it in memory of him. How he’d thresh out five acres of turnips before luncheon! We shall never see his like.” Bertram grows impatient: “Individually you may wear Waterburys or dog-collars, but each is nevertheless a symbol of inequality between you and the man in the street, who is obliged to look at the church clock to see the hour at which he may seek the parish dole.” “What profound philosophy!” cries Southwold. “What crimes one may commit without knowing it!” “If a watch be an unwholesome sign of a bloated aristocracy, pray, Mr. Bertram, what are our jewels?” asks a very pretty woman, Lady Jane Rivaux. “There are no words strong enough,” replies Bertram, “to condemn the use of gems, whether from a moral or an æsthetic point of view. In a purified condition of society they would of course become impossible abominations.” The ladies present are too horrified to speak; Jane Rivaux, alone, recovering her first shock of surprise at such a blasphemy, asks, with vivacity: “But all the people you would throw out of employment? The people who dig for jewels, don’t they dig? The people who polish them, and cut them, and set them, and deal in them; the people who make the iron safes, and the patent locks, you would throw them all out of work? Surely that wouldn’t be doing any good? What would become of the miners and lapidaries and jewellers and all the rest?” Bertram smiles with pitying disdain. “Oh, my dear Lady Jane, your kind of reasoning is as old as the hills, and carries its own refutation with it. All those workmen and tradesmen would be liberated from labours which now degrade them, and would thus be set free for higher work--work worthy of being illumined by the light of reason.” “What work? Would they be all schoolmasters and governesses? Or all authors and artists?” “What work? Such work as the Community might organise and distribute, such work as might be needful for the general good. When every one will work, every one will have leisure. The poet will mow the meadow in the morning and compose his eclogues in the afternoon. The painter will fell trees at dawn and at noon paint his landscapes in the forest. The sculptor will hew coal in the bowels of the earth for a few hours and come to the upper air to carve the marble and mould the clay. The author will guide the plough or plant the potato-patch at sunrise and will have the rest of the day free to write his novel or study his essay----” “Humph!” says Southwold, ruffling his short grey hair in perplexity. “The precise use of wasting Sir Frederic Leighton’s time on a seam of coal, and Mr. Swinburne’s on a mowing machine, I don’t exactly perceive. However----” “Pierre Loti is your ideal, then,” says Cicely Seymour. “He ‘has gone down to the deep in ships’ before he writes of sea life.”