"I have had a shindy with Burrows, dear--rather a bad one. But that's all. I walked down to the station with Ashton"--Ashton was a neighbouring magistrate and coal-owner--"and there we found Valentine Burrows. Two or three friends were in charge of him, and it has been given out lately that he has been suffering from nervous breakdown, owing to his exertions. All that I could see was that he was drunker than usual--no doubt to drown defeat. Anyway, directly he saw me he made a scene--foamed and shouted. According to him, I am at the bottom of the men's defeat. It is all my wild-beast delight in the sight of suffering,--my love of 'fattening on the misery of the collier,'--my charming villanies of all sorts--that are responsible for everything. Altogether he reached a fine flight! Then he got violent--tried to get at me with his knobbed stick. Ashton and I, and the men with him, succeeded in quelling him without bothering the police.--I don't think anything more will come of it." And he stretched out his hand to some salted almonds, helping himself with particular deliberation. After dinner, however, he lay down on a sofa in Letty's sitting-room, obliged to confess himself worn out. She made him comfortable, and after she had given him a cushion, she suddenly bent over him from behind and kissed him. "Come here!" he said, with a smile, throwing up his hand to catch her. But with an odd blush and conscious look, she eluded him. When, a little later, she came to sit by him with some needle-work she found him restless and inclined to talk. "I wonder if we are always to live in this state of war for one's bread and butter!" he said, impatiently throwing down a newspaper he had been reading. "It doesn't tend to make life agreeable--does it? Yet what on earth--" He threw back his head, with a stiff protesting air, staring across the room. Letty had the sudden impression that he was not talking to her at all, but to some third person, unseen. "_Either_ capital gets its fair remuneration"--he went on in an argumentative voice--"and ability its fair wages--_or_ the Marxian state, labour-notes, and the rest of it. There is no half-way house--absolutely none. As for me, I am not going to lend my capital for nothing--nor to give my superintendence for nothing. And I don't ask exorbitant pay for either. It is quite simple. My conscience is quite clear." "I should think so!" said Letty, resentfully. "I wonder whether Marcella--is all for the men? She has never mentioned the strike in her letters." As the Christian name slipped out, she flushed, and he was conscious of a curious start. But the breaking through of a long reticence was deliberate on Letty's part. "Very likely she is all for the men," he said drily, after a pause. "She never could take a strike calmly. Her instinct always was to catch hold of any stick that could beat the employers--Watton and I used often to tease her about it."