When she had gone, he sate staring helplessly at the boiled egg, as if he expected something to hatch out of it. Even thought forsook him, for the first to come was that this woman was his wife. Wife! the word conjured up such a different idea in the hereditary experience which inevitably underlay all things in him, that he could go no further in bewilderment. So, in the effort to escape from the thraldom of the old wisdom, which such as he have to make so often, he took up the newspaper which lay beside him, telling himself passionately that the old order had changed, that life held more than his fathers had dreamt of. Yet even as he told himself this, the burden of doubt which such as he have to bear came upon him, a sense of unreality, even in himself, closed round him. Unreal! Unreal! Unreal! The word typed itself on the columns of the _Voice of India_ as he read them. The paper was the recognised organ of his class, the exponent of its desires, its beliefs. Yet here even that word pursued him. Here on the first page was a leader stigmatising the temporary withdrawal of independent powers from the Municipal Committee as an unwarrantable piece of tyranny. Unwarrantable! Was it possible for any sane man to call it so, knowing, as all knew, the grievous tale of neglect and wrongdoing in that Committee? Was it possible, even apart from that, for any wise man not to see that with plague clamouring for an entrance, the good of the many claimed a more energetic sanitary reform than the Committee seemed able or willing to introduce? And as for the hints thrown out that the newly-published plague regulations were but a sop, a blind, hiding a very different policy; what then? Was it possible for any government to do more than legislate for the _present_? Who but fools imagined that it could or would bind itself to definite action in conditions which could only be guessed at? So the tale of unreality went on. Here was a well-written, well-reasoned article on the cow-killing grievance; but Chris, being a wielder of the pen himself, happened to know the writer, and could remember seeing him eating beefsteaks at the Temple dinners. Again, in a paragraph headed 'Government Greed and Peasant Poverty.' Could any detail overcome the indubitable fact that India had the cheapest civilised government in the world? He ran his eye down another column, and caught the phrase 'social progress' above a signature which he knew to be that of a man who had just married a child of ten. And what was this? '_The Government to which is opposed the entire intelligence of the nation!_' Brave words these, when the proportion between such intelligence and the general ignorance was withheld! What was it? Ten thousand to one! '_The political training of the mass of the people is still, it is true, somewhat incomplete_.' It might well be that when the percentage of mere literates was almost negligible.