Reb Monash was engaged in a conversation with a lady who had two sons to dispose into a _chayder_. He thought it discreet for the moment to remain outwardly unaware of the sinful hour Philip had chosen for his return. Open disapproval would have displayed Philip as no satisfactory sample, so to speak, of the paternal wares. He turned to Philip and with a gentle significance the two-sonned lady could not have fathomed, inquired, "Sewelson?" "No!" replied Philip, "Socialism!" Reb Monash's lips tightened imperceptibly. He resumed the conversation with his client. "Of course," declared Philip enthusiastically some time later, "there's absolutely no doubt of it! Shelley was an out-and-out Socialist! As much of a Socialist as that candidate fellow, Dan what's-his-name!" "You're right! Shelley was all there!" affirmed Harry. He beamed pleasantly upon his convert. "All the decent chaps have been Socialists from the beginning. Christ too, he was no end of a Socialist!" "Don't know anything about Christ!" said Philip uneasily. There was something disturbing in this treatment of Christ. Christ belonged in the first place to Russia, where they impaled babies in His honour; and then to the Baptist Missionary Chapel, where He was associated with soup and magic lanterns; and to the Christian prayers at school wherein, of course, Philip had no part. "Christ was a Jew, after all," Harry put in tentatively, "like Karl Marx." "Karl Marx?" "Yes, that's the chap who wrote the big book you were looking at, on the chair near you. I can't say I quite understand it, but they all say you've got to read it, so I got it out of the library." "Oh that! I don't like that sort of Socialism, it's as bad as Mathers' Latin! I prefer Shelley's. How does it go? Oh yes, don't you think this is fine poetry and fine Socialism, both together in one? _Arise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number. Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fatten upon you. Ye are many. They are few!_ Isn't it fine?" "Whist! Yes, that beats the song we sing at the Socialist meetings--all about keeping the red flag flying, eh? It leaves old man Tennyson a bit husky, what do you think?" "Steady dog, isn't he, Tennyson? Wants to take his time about it. Doesn't he say something like _Freedom slowly broadens down From precedent to precedent....?_ Doesn't that mean you've got to take things sort of quietly?" "... While mothers haven't got any milk for their kids and Doomington stinks with corpses! By God! It makes me sick! But there's no point rubbing it into you, you dark horse. You've been a Socialist for the last--how many--fourteen years? But listen, I've not told you? Dan Jamieson wants me to get on my hind legs and say a few words at one of his meetings. What do you say to that?" "I'd be frightened out of my life. But how does he know you'll not make a muck of it?"