'Very likely. But it's nothing new. Money has always possessed its own buying power--it always will. Only there's such a devil of a lot of it now in certain hands that a poor man can't keep anything of his own. And the hands that own it are not English. But they want England. Anyhow, as you say, it is no use being old-fashioned; but it is an immense luxury. You are luxurious, Judy.' 'What do you mean?' 'Well, the greatest luxury of your life was refusing to ask Mrs. Palmer to your house. How you could afford it I don't know.' 'It was delicious,' said Judy with great appreciation. 'Sybil was so sensible about it. She took just your view; she said she couldn't afford it herself, but that I was my own mistress. I wonder--I really wonder--why I find that class of person so intolerable.' 'Because you are old-fashioned; because you do not believe what is undoubtedly true--that wealth will get you anything----' 'Anything material it certainly will get you.' 'Quite so. And this is a materialistic age. I must go, as I'm dining out. Mind you let me know anything fresh in all these events that concern us.' Ginger went out into the thick, dim-coloured evening with a sense of quickened interest in things. His only passion in life was the observation of other people, but for the last month or two he had found very little to observe. Apart from his work as a clerk in the Foreign Office, which could have been done quite as well in half the time by an ordinary bank clerk at a quarter of his salary, his life was valueless from an economical point of view, while as far as his work went (from the same point of view) he was positively fraudulent. Thus, judged by the relentless standards of America, where work is paid for strictly by the demand which exists for it, and that demand is tested simply and solely by the criterion of whether it adds directly or indirectly to the wealth of the country, Ginger's services would have been dispensed with. For he was--though the wedge was being pulled out, not pushed in--the thin end of that wedge which in the days of George III. had provided so amply for the younger sons, nephews, and connections of the nobility. But the leisured ease in which those fortunate people could live in those days was rapidly passing away, and Ginger, from an economical point of view, was a very small specimen of an interesting survival. For, provided that a thing is done equally well in a cheap way as in an expensive way, it is inexcusable in the public service not to have it done as cheaply as possible. Whether the complete application of this principle will be found wholly successful in its working will be for succeeding generations to determine. But even to-day we have, so to speak, a working model of it in America. The money, once earned, of course becomes the entire property of the individual, and it is perfectly right that beggars should starve for a crust, while on the foreshore of Mon Repos the glutted vulgarocracy