“I know you haven’t,” he said. “I have no case to make against them either. They are out of work. That’s bad. But people who will ask need not be hungry. You can cut that out. The unemployed eat. You’ve seen it. Do the ravens feed them?” “What are you driving at?” I asked. “They all eat,” he repeated. “Ain’t that extraordinary?” “It doesn’t seem so to me,” I said. “They have to eat.” “Oh, do they?” he said. “You can eat merely because you have to, can you? Suppose there wasn’t anything to eat?” He was turning away, with his feathers up, as if he had carried the argument. But I detained him. “All right,” I said. “There is not enough work but plenty to eat. We’ll suppose it. What does that prove?” Eyeing me intently, with some new interest, he hesitated, not as to what he would say but as to whether he should bother to say it. “It proves,” he said, “that the country is rich. Nobody knows it. Nobody will believe it. The country is so rich that people may actually live without work.” “That’s an interesting point of view,” I said. “Who are you?” “Nobody,” he replied, with an oblique sneer. “A member of the Stock Exchange.” “Oh!” I said, before I could catch it. And not to leave the conversation in that lurch I asked: “Do you know who those two men were who wrangled in the smoking compartment?” “Editors,” he replied, cynically. “The younger one was Godkin of the Post. I’ve forgotten the other one’s name. Silly magpies! Pol-i-t-i-c-s, _hell_!” At that instant the ferryboat bumped into her slip. The petulant man screwed his head half round, jerked a come-along nod to a girl who had been standing just behind us, and stalked off in a mild brain fit. I had not noticed the girl before. She passed me to overtake her father,--I supposed it was her father,--and in passing she gave me a look which made me both hot and cold at once. It left me astonished, humiliated and angry. It was a full, open, estimating look, too impervious to be returned as it deserved and much too impersonal to be rude. It was worse than rude. I was an object and not a person. It occurred to me that either or both of us might have been stark nude and it would not have made the slightest difference. For a moment I thought I must have been mistaken,--that she was not a girl but a man-hardened woman. I followed them for some distance. And she was unmistakably a girl, probably under twenty, audaciously lithe and flexible. She walked without touching her father,--if he were that. He was a small man, wearing a soft hat a little down on one side, and moved with a bantam, egregious stride. One hand he carried deep in his trousers pocket, which gave him a slight list to the right, for his arms were short. The skirts of his overcoat fluttered in the wind and his left arm swung in an arc.