“You talk of righteousness, and justice, and brotherhood, and all the rest of the rotten humbug,” Violet Riversley went on, “and hold up your hands in horror when other people transgress against your paper ideals. But every nation is out for what it can make, every people will wade through oceans of blood and torture and infamy if it thinks it can reap any benefit from it. And why not? Survival of the fittest, that is nature’s law. But why can’t you say so? Instead of all this hypocrisy and pretence of high morals. You make me sick! What possible right have you to howl at the Germans? You are all the same—England and France and America—the whole lot of you. You have all taken by force or fraud. You have all driven out by arms and plots weaker peoples than yourselves. I don’t blame you for that—weaker people should go—it is the law of nature. But don’t go round whining about how good you are to them. You are just about as good to them as you are to your animals or anything else weaker than yourselves. Why can’t you have the courage of your brutality, and your lust, and your strength. It might be worth something then. You might be great. As it is you are only contemptible—the biggest fraud on the face of creation.” She faltered suddenly, and stopped. Ruth’s eyes had met hers steadily, all the time she had been speaking; and now her hostess spoke slowly and quietly, as one speaks to a little child when one wants to impress something upon it. “Why do you talk like that, Violet Riversley?” she asked. “You know you do not think like that yourself.” North, standing by the window, watched, with the fingers of a horrible anxiety gripping him. His daughter’s face in the leaping firelight looked like a twisted distorted mask. Lady Condor, open-mouthed, comically perplexed, stared from one to the other, for once speechless. “It is the truth.” Violet Riversley uttered the words slowly, it seemed with difficulty. “_You_ do not think so,” answered Ruth, still as one who would impress a fact on a child. Then she rose from her chair. “Come!” she said, with a strange note of command in her voice, “I know you will all like to walk round the place before tea.” Violet passed her hand across her eyes, much as a person will do when waking from the proverbial forty winks. She stood up, and shivered a little. Ruth was talking, after a fashion unusual to her, almost forcing the conversation into certain channels. “Yes, of course, you are very right, Lady Condor,” she said. “No man can be valued truly until you see what he can do just with his brain and his character and his own two hands. Now I can give Violet a really fine character for work. As a matter of fact I am filled with jealousy. She can milk quicker than I can. I think because she learnt when she was quite young. Mr. Carey taught her.”