“A wise man wouldn’t commit himself till the dying lion was much nearer his last kick,” Saltash answered with refreshing candour. “If Lingfield’s centre party falls down, he and Birkenhead and Austen won’t get any mercy from Foreditch and the men who want an all-conservative ministry; and, if Foreditch wounds Ll-G. without killing the coalition, his die-hard tories needn’t look for office from the centre party. It’s too early to say. When I give you the hint . . . I’m here most evenings,” he concluded with an affability that rather disquieted me. “I’ll remember that,” I said; and, when the last of many political crises ended fifteen months later in the prime minister’s resignation, I made it my business to dine nightly at the Turf and Stage. I was never a member; but Sonia, who also was not a member, introduced me to Gaspard; and Gaspard, bowing from the waist, assured me in the French of the Midi that Mrs. O’Rane’s friends were always welcome. 4 She was not at the club on the night when Saltash took me to observe the signs of the times; but I found her husband talking to Barbara when I arrived home. He was armed with the notes of an article and wished to use my paper for an attack on the entire English system of inheritance and property. “We’re hypnotized by 1914,” he broke out stormily. “We treat the old world like a vast Pompeii, which we’re uncovering bit by bit. People won’t see that we’re repairing from copies of old models.” . . . “I’d sooner live in old Pompeii than in new Turin,” Barbara murmured. “If Pompeii had been paradise in 1914, it would be an outworn paradise now!” O’Rane, I thought, looked tired and old, as though perpetual opposition was gradually wearing him down. “The world changes in seven years, especially if the inhabitants have spent four of them withstanding a stream of molten lava. Can you tell me a single idea we’ve put forward, a single effort we’ve made to improve on 1914 so that Pompeii shall not be buried again?” I left Barbara to wrestle with his question while I glanced at the manuscript article. O’Rane’s own contribution to the ideas of the new age seemed to be that the hand of every man must be against his neighbour so long as unequal wealth made the one arrogant and the other envious. As human capacities were unequal, wealth must continue to be unequally amassed for a single lifetime; but to perpetuate this inequality was to perpetuate the friction that ultimately lead to revolution and civil war. “You’re at least consistent,” I said. “On the night Stornaway died, you told me there was no room in the modern state for these gigantic fortunes.” “I doubt if we have room for private transmitted wealth of any kind,” he answered. “It debilitates the individual, it demoralizes society. I’m seeing that every day in my own work.”