"You have? And you think I'm exempt. Why?" Osmond was not getting anywhere. MacLeod and his own ineptitude of speech seemed to be forcing him into the solicitous fright of the mother, bent on shielding her child from the wolf. "You are too powerful," he said, and realized that he was using the evidence Rose had given him, thought for thought. "I hope so. I ought to be. I've got to overturn power." "What's the use? You're a czar yourself. You're only another kind." MacLeod looked at him thoughtfully, as if struck by the form of words. "My dear fellow," he said, "is it possible you believe in the present state of things? Do you want one man to possess everything and the next man nothing?" Osmond frowned his negation. MacLeod, unfairly it seemed to him, made him feel young and inadequate to the matter. He had the eyes to see what cause was just, yet he had not the equipment to maintain any cause at all. "What is the use," he essayed, "for you and men like you to head revolts? It only means you are ruling instead of the rulers you overturn. It will all be done over again. The big man will rise to the top. The little man will go under. And in time you will have the same conditions repeated. It's because you are not teaching love. You are teaching envy and hate." "How do you know I am?" Osmond kept on as if he were speaking to himself, groping painfully for what he found. "You are not preaching good work. You are preaching revolt against work--class hatred and discontent." "Do you believe in non-resistance?" "No." "Do you believe in Midas, king of gold, swelled up with power, sitting smiling on the throne he has forced others to build for him, and saying, 'I am not as other men are'?" "No. But I believe in work. You mustn't take it out of a man, that certainty that his own work is the greatest privilege he's got. Oh, you mustn't do that!" There it was again, his hungry worship of achievement. It might even have seemed to him that oppression was not much to bear if, at the same time, a man had the glory of setting his hand to something and seeing it prosper. MacLeod, who knew something about his life, but nothing of its inward processes, began to feel that here was more than at first appeared, and answered rather temperately,-- "I don't believe you know much about the general conditions under which work is done. Work means to you Peter's painting a picture. Let it mean, for example, a great many Peters in a mine delving all day for some smug capitalist who wants to endow monuments to himself and get his children into society. What then?" What then, indeed? Osmond could not answer; but a moment later he said again, tenaciously,-- "I don't want you to destroy the idea of good work." "Well, now!" MacLeod spoke impatiently. He realized that here was not a man whom his torrent of bloody facts would move, but who demanded also a more persuasive rhetoric. "Well, now, you acknowledge the world is upside down. Shall we leave it so?"