“_Children of Capital; Children of Labour. They suffer in the transition. They pay for the bitter triumphs. They are weighed down by the pride. If the young men could but learn that gain is without profit they would know that force is barren. When all the world has that knowledge_”.... He tore up the envelope. “But that’s the coming of the Kingdom,” he thought. Did he himself believe, with absolute belief, that force was barren? It was easier to compromise, to risk nothing, to wait; safer to go slowly. Everything would right itself in time. That was a comfortable thought--but a lie. He shifted his feet on the carpet, and, turning, peered beyond the soft blur of his reading-lamp into the dark room. And a phrase came upon him suddenly, like galloping hoofs ringing close in the dark against a frost-bit road. Its strange rhythm startled him as if it had been the clatter of horses riding him down. “... Finally to beat down Satan under our feet ... finally to beat down Satan under our feet....” CHAPTER XXI THE CURRENCY I It happened that his mother’s reply, reaching the _Pathshire_ in the middle of October, came to John soon after he had learnt of what he believed to be his irretrievable loss of Margaret. With her loss his need for her became more instant. While she had belonged to none other, and his own future had been at least not closed to dreams, he had hesitated to admit, even to himself, that he loved her. The lesson of the complete insignificance of midshipmen, which the Service teaches with such energy and eagerness, had been so deeply impressed upon him that, even in a matter so personal as this, he had been unable to forget it. “For drill purposes,” as the Service says, snotties did not love--they had women; and it was indeed ridiculous in one whose pay was twelve-and-threepence a week to contemplate any love that might lead to marriage. Moreover, John had felt that Time was on his side, and Chance as yet not a declared enemy. He had dreamed of a swift end to his snotty days, of expanding fortune, of reinforced hope. He had wished to justify his claim to Margaret before making it. It had seemed enough that she should stand for the imaginative, the creative, the permanent--a contrast to that professional side of his life which he took to be destructive and ephemeral. But now all these things were changed. By his mother’s letter it had been made clear that there would be no expansion of fortune, no reinforcement of hope, no breaking free into a new world. Margaret ceased to represent the possibly attainable.