“You,” he continued, “are an aristocrat of the aristocrats. I can quite conceive that you found your position in Russia incompatible with modern ideas. The Russian aristocracy, if you will forgive my saying so, is in for a bad time which it has done its best to thoroughly deserve. But in England your position is scarcely so comprehensible. Here you come to a sanely governed country, which is, to all effects and purposes, a country governed by the people for the people. Yet here, within two years, you have made yourself one of the champions of democracy. Why? The people are not ill-treated. On the contrary, I should call them pampered.” “You do not understand,” she explained earnestly. “In Russia it was the aristocracy who oppressed the people, shamefully and malevolently. In England it is the bourgeoisie who rule the country and stand in the light of Labour. It is the middleman, the profiteer, the new capitalist here who has become an ugly and a dominant power. Labour has the means by which to assert itself and to claim its rights, but has never possessed the leaders or the training. That has been the subject of my lectures over here from the beginning. I want to teach the people how to crush the middleman. I want to show them how to discover and to utilise their strength.” “Is not that a little dangerous?” he enquired. “You might easily produce a state of chaos.” “For a time, perhaps,” she admitted, “but never for long. You see, the British have one transcendental quality; they possess common sense. They are not idealists like the Russians. The men with whom I mix neither walk with their heads turned to the clouds nor do they grope about amongst the mud. They just look straight ahead of them, and they ask for what they see in the path.” “I see,” he murmured. “And now, having reached just this stage in our conversation, let me ask you this. You read the newspapers?” “Diligently,” she assured him. “Are you aware of a very curious note of unrest during the last few days--hints at a crisis in the war which nothing in the military situation seems to justify--vague but rather gloomy suggestions of an early peace?” “Every one is talking about it,” she agreed. “I think that you and I have some idea as to what it means.” “Have we?” he asked quietly. “And somehow,” she went on, dropping her voice a little, “I believe that your knowledge goes farther than mine.”