“What’s appalling?” Shearwater inquired. He walked with his big head bowed, his hands clasped behind his back and clutching his hat; walked clumsily, with sudden lurches of his whole massive anatomy. Wherever he was, Shearwater always seemed to take up the space that two or three ordinary people would normally occupy. Cool fingers of wind passed refreshingly through his hair. He was thinking of the experiment he meant to try, in the next few days, down at the physiological laboratory. You’d put a man on an ergometer in a heated chamber and set him to work—hours at a time. He’d sweat, of course, prodigiously. You’d make arrangements for collecting the sweat, weighing it, analysing it and so on. The interesting thing would be to see what happened at the end of a few days. The man would have got rid of so much of his salts, that the blood composition might be altered and all sorts of delightful consequences might follow. It ought to be a capital experiment. Gumbril’s exclamation disturbed him. “What’s appalling?” he asked rather irritably. “Those people at the coffee-stall,” Gumbril answered. “It’s appalling that human beings should have to live like that. Worse than dogs.” “Dogs have nothing to complain of.” Shearwater went off at a tangent. “Nor guinea-pigs, nor rats. It’s these blasted anti-vivisection maniacs who make all the fuss.” “But think,” cried Gumbril, “what these wretched people have had to suffer! Walking all the way to Portsmouth in search of work; and the woman with child. It’s horrifying. And then, the way people of that class are habitually treated. One has no idea of it until one has actually been treated that way oneself. In the war, for example, when one went to have one’s mitral murmurs listened to by the medical board—they treated one then as though one belonged to the lower orders, like all the rest of the poor wretches. It was a real eye-opener. One felt like a cow being got into a train. And to think that the majority of one’s fellow-beings pass their whole lives being shoved about like maltreated animals!” “H’m,” said Shearwater. If you went on sweating indefinitely, he supposed, you would end by dying.