In lulls between the merrymaking he remembered with shame that he had not done his duty by his principles. It was to make up for arrears in enthusiasm that he had cut short his grouse shooting to accompany Mr. Falx to an International Labour Conference in Rome. The conference was to be held towards the end of September; but Lord Hovenden had sacrificed a month’s more shooting than was necessary by suggesting that, before the conference, Mr. Falx and he should go to stay for a few weeks with Mrs. Aldwinkle. “Come when you like and bring whom you like.” Those were the words of Lilian’s invitation. He telegraphed to Mrs. Aldwinkle to say that Mr. Falx needed a holiday and that he proposed to bring him; Mrs. Aldwinkle replied that she would be delighted to have him. There they were. Mr. Falx paused for a moment before answering Mr. Cardan’s question. He turned his bright dark eyes round the table as though collecting everybody’s attention; then spoke in the penetrating, musical voice that had stirred so many audiences to enthusiasm. “Twentieth-century rulers,” he said, “respect the educated democracy too much to try to bamboozle it and keep it falsely contented by mere shows. Democracies demand reason.” “Oh, come,” protested Mr. Cardan. “What about Mr. Bryan’s agitation against Evolution?” “Moreover,” Mr. Falx went on, ignoring the point, “we in the twentieth century have outgrown that sort of thing.” “Perhaps we have,” said Mr. Cardan. “Though I can’t imagine how we should have. Opinions change, of course, but the love of a show isn’t an opinion. It’s founded on something deeper, something which has no business to change.” Mr. Cardan shook his head. “It reminds me,” he went on after a little pause, “of another, similarly deep-rooted change that I can never account for: the change in our susceptibility to flattery. It’s impossible to read any ancient moralist without finding copious warnings against flatterers. ‘A flattering mouth worketh ruin’—it’s in the Bible. And the reward of the flatterer is also specified there. ‘He that speaketh flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his children shall fail’—though one would have thought that the vicariousness of the threatened punishment rendered it a little less formidable. But at any rate, in ancient days the great and the prosperous seem to have been fairly at the mercy of flatterers. And they laid it on so thick, they did their job, from all accounts, so extremely coarsely! Can it be that the educated plutocracy of those days was really taken in by that sort of thing? It wouldn’t be now. The flattery would have to be a great deal more subtle nowadays to produce the same effect. Moreover, I never find in the works of the modern moralists any warnings against flatterers. There’s been some sort of change; though how it has come about, I really don’t quite know.” “Perhaps there has been a moral progress,” suggested Mr. Falx.