"Well...." said Kitty. And perhaps it was well that at that moment they reached Marylebone. That conversation was typical, even as Ivy Delmer's standpoint was itself typical, of a large body of what, for lack of a better name, we must call thought, all over the country. Laws were all very well in theory, or when they only disarranged the lives of others, but when they touched and disorganised one's own life--hands off. Was the only difference between such as Ivy Delmer and such as Nicholas Chester that Ivy deceived herself ("It's not that I care a bit for myself, but it's the principle of the thing") and that Chester fell with open eyes? Which was perhaps as much as to say that Ivy was classified B3 and Chester A. All over the country people were saying, according to their different temperaments, one or another of these things. "Of course I don't care for myself, but I think the system is wrong," or (the other way round) "It may be all right in theory, but I'm jolly well not going to stand being inconvenienced by it," or "I'm not going to stand it _and_ it's all wrong." Of course there were also those more public-spirited persons who said, "It's a splendid system and I'm going to fall in with it," or "Though it's a rotten system I suppose we must put up with it." But these were the minority. 3 Up till November the campaign against the Brains Ministry was quite impersonal, merely resentment against a system. It was led, in the Press, by the Labour papers, which objected to compulsion, by the _Nation_, which objected to what it, rightly or wrongly, called by that much-abused name, Prussianism, by the _New Witness_, which objected to interference with the happy stupidity of merry Gentiles (making them disagreeably clever like Jews), and by _Stop It_, which objected to everything. It was supported by the more normal organs of opinion of the kind which used before and during the war to be called conservative and liberal. And, of course, through thick and thin, by the _Hidden Hand_. But in the course of November a new element came into the attack--the personal element. Certain sections of the Press which supported the Ministry began to show discontent with the Minister. The _Times_ began to hint guardedly that new blood might perhaps be desirable in certain quarters. The _Daily Mail_, in its rounder and directer manner, remarked in large head-lines that "Nicky is played out." Ministers have to bear these intimations about themselves as they walk about London; fleeing from old gentlemen selling the _Daily Mail_ outside Cox's, Chester was confronted in the Strand by the _Herald_ remarking very loudly "CHESTER MUST GO." And then (but this was later) by the _Patriot_, which was much, much worse.