"You look incredulous, sir; but I have already startled that Commission you put me on, and compelled it to include in the scope of its inquiry things which it did not want to inquire into at all. Believe me, sir; if we get before us all the evidence that I intend we shall find ourselves forced into making a very unpopular report--far more unpopular than my book would have been, and far more subversive of the established order of things than at present you can have any idea. Even your coats, sir--exorbitant though their price now is--are going to cost you more as a result of this Commission, unless we can so arrange that in future a little less shall be paid for the 'cut' and a little more for the needle and thread that join the cuttings together. I am going to have it said in this report of ours--for I have discovered it to be a fact--that the very clothes which are your daily wear (and mine) are put together by men and women paid at something less than twopence-half-penny an hour. And I am going to get it put in that scandalously personal way (your clothes and mine--the clothes we go to open Parliament in, and set the fashions in, and when we have worn them some half-dozen times hand on to charity), I am going to have it thus put that all may be conscious and ashamed when they see us so exhibiting ourselves, and no longer think a well-cut coat under modern commercial conditions a fit adjunct for royalty. That, sir, will do a great deal more harm to 'trade' than my book would have done. The public conscience does not like to have these things brought home to royalty itself; we and the 'social evil' are in no way to be connected with each other, lest it should be seen that we help to make its ways easy. Only the other day I was credibly informed that a man who headed with twenty thousand pounds the list of a charity bearing my mother's name, has been allowed by the police to get out of this country scot free--though guilty of infamous conduct,--merely because the contribution of that tainted donation to a royal fund would not have 'looked well.'" "Oh, stop talking to me, Max!" cried the King, made irritable by his increased sense of helplessness. "Go and do what you like, say what you like, report what you like; you've got the Commission to play with; run it for all it is worth; but for Heaven's sake let me have peace for a while! Why should you trouble me? You know that I can do nothing." "You have done a great deal," said Max, whose admiration for his father had grown very considerably during the past year. "I have missed doing a great deal; but of that you know nothing, and I'm not going to tell you." And then he could stand it no more. "Do you imagine I should have made you that idiotic promise," he cried, "if I had supposed for a moment that I should still be here when you came to claim it?" And so saying he got up and, diplomatic in retreat, hurried out of the room.