He agreed that it was so, but attributed the craze for alcohol partly to the climate, and partly to the gradual degradation of the social conditions of life amongst the poor. The separation between the masses and the classes was more pronounced, he thought, in England than in any other country of which he knew anything. “I don’t wonder at the poor creatures drinking,” said he; “it is the only way they have of satisfying the natural aspiration of mankind for the ideal!” “You mean, we are all more or less poets, and alcohol develops the latent genius within us?” said Mildred. “I do, and I can never tolerate the argument that a man who drinks makes a beast of himself, because the beast can have no desire to minister to a sense which he does not possess.” “Then you would say, that the universal desire for some sort of intoxication is a proof of the higher and immortal nature of man,” said Mr. Crowe. “In a certain degree, yes; because all error is a perversion of some truth. A booze of bad beer and a glass of gin do for the lower man what Shakespeare and Keats, Bacon and Macaulay do for the cultured man—lift him for a while from his sordid surroundings, and raise him to a Monte Cristo palace of beautiful imagery. Mind, this is all the more sinful, all the more degrading at last, because it is buying of the devil at the price of your soul what God would have given you in another and a better way, if you had asked Him.” “Very pretty,” said Crowe, “but I don’t believe it a bit!” Dr. Graves said he thought that the theory was as clever, yet as improbable, as that of an American friend of his, who held that all children told lies, because by nature their dramatic faculties were in advance of their moral principles. Fibbing children were on this theory all premature poets. And so the symposium ended, and the little party broke up. CHAPTER XXXIX. MILDRED FINDS HER WORK. “This is not our work,” you say, “this is the work of men.” Be it so if you like. Let them be the hands to do it: but who, if not women, are to be the hearts of the redemption of the poor from social wrong? —_Stopford Brooke._ Live greatly; so shalt thou acquire Unknown capacities of joy. —_Coventry Patmore._ When the ladies reached their own room that night, Mildred began at once with something which was, evidently, uppermost in her mind. “Aunt Janet, do you believe in special providences?” “Do I not, dear! you know my life has been full of them.” “Well, auntie, it seems absurd that every action of our lives should be interesting to Heaven, but I think I was sent to Granada as the great turning-point in my life.”