Because you know it is idle to pretend that the talk of Charterson and Sir Isaac wasn’t a heavy flow of base ideas; they hadn’t even the wit to sham very much about their social significance. They cared no more for the growth, the stamina, the spirit of the people whose lives they dominated than a rat cares for the stability of the house it gnaws. They _wanted_ a broken-spirited people. They were in such relations wilfully and offensively stupid, and I do not see why we people who read and write books should pay this stupidity merely because it is prevalent even the mild tribute of an ironical civility. Charterson talked of the gathering trouble that might lead to a strike of the transport workers in London docks, and what he had to say, he said,—he repeated it several times—was, “_Let_ them strike. We’re ready. The sooner they strike the better. Devonport’s a Man and this time we’ll _beat_ ’em....” He expanded generally on strikes. “It’s a question practically whether we are to manage our own businesses or whether we’re to have them managed for us. _Managed_ I say!...” “They know nothing of course of the details of organization,” said Blenker, shining with intelligence and looking quickly first to the right and then to the left. “Nothing.” Sir Isaac broke out into confirmatory matter. There was an idea in his head that this talk might open his wife’s eyes to some sense of the magnitude of his commercial life, to the wonder of its scale and quality. He compared notes with Charterson upon a speeding-up system for delivery vans invented by an American specialist and it made Blenker flush with admiration and turn as if for sympathy to Lady Harman to realize how a modification in a tailboard might mean a yearly saving in wages of many thousand pounds. “The sort of thing they don’t understand,” he said. And then Sir Isaac told of some of his own little devices. He had recently taken to having the returns of percentage increase and decrease from his various districts printed on postcards and circulated monthly among the district managers, postcards endorsed with such stimulating comments in red type as “Well done Cardiff!” or “What ails Portsmouth?”—the results had been amazingly good; “neck and neck work,” he said, “everywhere”—and thence they passed to the question of confidential reports and surprise inspectors. Thereby they came to the rights and wrongs of the waitress strike. And then it was that Lady Harman began to take a share in the conversation. She interjected a question. “Yes,” she said suddenly and her interruption was so unexpected that all three men turned their eyes to her. “But how much do the girls get a week?” “I thought,” she said to some confused explanations by Blenker and Charterson, “that gratuities were forbidden.” Blenker further explained that most of the girls of the class Sir Isaac was careful to employ lived at home. Their income was “supplementary.”