In the thick of it Old Mole, to satisfy himself, walked over to that town which is advertised as the Queen of Watering Places. There were thousands of the middle classes on the sands. Their children were sprawling on sand castles and dabbling in the thin washings of the sea. Fathers and mothers were lounging in deck chairs, sleeping under handkerchiefs and hats and umbrellas; grandmothers were squatting in charge of their grandchildren. Some of them were reading about the strike in the newspapers. At teatime the beach was cleared as though all human beings had been blown from it by a sea breeze. An hour later it was thickly thronged and the pierrots in their little open-air theater were playing to an enormous audience. The strike had prolonged their holiday; they were prepared to go on in its monotony instead of in the monotony of their work and domestic life. They were quite contented, dully acceptant. There were no trains? Very well, then; they would wait until there were trains. Respectable, well-behaved, orderly, genteel people do not starve. . . . And they were right. However, it set Old Mole thinking about his own means, the independence which he owed to no virtue nor talent, nor thrift of his own, but to a system which he did not understand, to sources which in the intricacies of their journey to himself were impossible to follow. Of the many enterprises all over the world, in the profits of which he had his share, he knew nothing at all. The reports that were sent to him were too boring or too technical to read. The postman and the fish buyer assured him that he was living upon the underpaid and overtaxed labors of thousands of unhappy men and women. He had no reason for disbelieving them, but, on the whole, his sympathies were with the middle-classes, his attitude theirs; that respectable, well-behaved, orderly, genteel people do not starve. Not that he classed himself with them; he disliked the memory of his colleagues at Thrigsby, of the men at the golf club at Bigley more than anything, and at this time he was not moderate in his dislikes. He warmed to the enthusiasm of the Socialists, but was exasperated by the manner in which, after having made a clean sweep of everything except themselves and their kind, they could produce no constructive idea, but only a thin cerebral fluid, done up in different colored bottles as in a pharmacy. Just at the point when he found himself beginning to dream of a world of decent, kindly, human beings delivered (as far as possible) from their own folly and the tyrannies bred from it, they left humanity altogether and gloated hectically over their "questions." If that were Socialism, he would have none of it; he preferred money. He told them so, and found that he had uttered the most appalling blasphemy. They said that Socialism was a religion, the religion that would save the world. Said Old Mole: