Adams was one part in earnest and two parts impish in the manner of the superior person who is out for an intellectual lark. He had a constant preoccupation with that which is known above all other questions as _the_ social question. It was not a nice preoccupation for a young man: it was, for instance, remote from the healthy exuberance of Sam’s Rabelaisianism. And, of course, Adams was wily: he wasn’t the stuff of martyrdom. He enjoyed, as an intellectual gymnastic, the treatment of his subject so that it should at once shock his audience and win him their approval as an honest man doing an unpleasant job from conviction. Sam agreed with Stewart. His old prejudice against Adams was strong within him and he hoped Adams would come a cropper. That was at the beginning, when Adams, with an egregious affectation of superiority, began to read his lecture; but soon, quite soon, Sam changed his mind and hoped for nothing but that the skilful skater would keep his balance, on the thin ice. “Rich for Ada,” and here, as Sam saw it, was a “stroke” indeed if Adams were successful to the end and if at the end he would listen sensibly to Sam. Adams was in little danger. He was of Oxford, London, the world, and his audience of Manchester. And he stooped to conquer with a lecture that was a mosaic of advances and retreats, of blazing indiscretions and smug apologies, of audacities and diffidence. Sam watched the audience keenly, and it would not be unjust to say that the audience gloated. Not all of them gloated, but as a whole, as an audience, they lapped up Adams’ lecture like mother’s milk. He called it frankness and gave unnecessary detail, he had an appearance of honest indignation and a reality of bathing in mud with relish. It was abominable but diabolically clever; indecent to the core, it artfully evaded anything to warrant a police court charge of indecency; it was foulness cloaked in piety, marching under the banner of Reform. He was a crusader in masquerade, flashing beneath their guard of British reticence a rapier whose hilt was a cross. Adams found a curious satisfaction in standing there, like a penitent at a Salvation Army meeting, pretending to an immense personal knowledge of evil which was, happily, impossible, and he delighted in the presence of a cleric in the chair. The thing developed, for him, into an exciting game, a contest of his wits with Peter’s. He had carried his audience, but the chairman sat aloof and dubious. If Peter saw through him, he had lost; if not, he won. For Peter he read the condemnatory passages with vibrant earnestness, and for Peter he read as if reluctantly, conscience-impelled, the details of his evidence.