"I fancy that won't be necessary," said Chester. "Rendle and his friends are coming in here, apparently." The door was burst open, and men rushed in. Chester and Prideaux faced them, standing before the door. "You fools," Chester said again. "What good do you think you're going to do yourselves by this?" "Here he is, boys! Here's Nicky Chester, the married man!" Chester and Prideaux were surrounded and pinioned. "Don't hurt him," someone exhorted. "We'll hang him out over the balcony and ask the boys down there what to do with him." They dragged him on to the balcony and swung him over the rail, dangling him by a leg and an arm. One of them shouted, "Here's the Minister, boys! Here's Nicky, the Minister of Brains!" The crowd looked up and saw him, swinging in mid air, and a great shout went up. "Yes," went on the speaker from the balcony, "Here's Nicky Chester, the man who dares to dictate to the people of Britain who they may marry and what kids they may have, and then goes and gets married himself, breaking his own laws, and hushes it up so that he thought it would never come out." ("I always knew it would come out," the Minister muttered, inarticulately protesting against this estimate of his intelligence.) "But it _has_ come out," the speaker continued. "And now what are we to do with him, with this man who won't submit to the laws he forces on other people? This man who dares to tell other people to bear what he won't bear himself? What shall we do with him? Drop him down into the street?" For a moment it seemed that the Minister's fate, like himself, hung suspended. They swung him gently to and fro, as if to get an impetus.... Then someone shouted, "We'll let him off this time, as he's just married. Let him go home to his wife, and not meddle with government any more!" The crowd rocked with laughter; and in that laughter, rough, good-humoured, scornful, the Ministry of Brains seemed to dissolve. They drew Chester in through the window again. Someone said, "Now we'll set the blooming hotel on fire. No time to waste, boys." Chester and Prideaux were dragged firmly but not unkindly down the stairs and out through the door. Their appearance outside the building, each pinioned by two stalwart ex-guardsmen, was hailed by a shout, partly of anger, but three parts laughter. To Chester it was the laughter, good-humoured, stupid, scornful, of the British public at ideas, and particularly at ideas which had failed. But in it, sharp and stinging, was another, more contemptuous laughter, levelled at a man who had failed to live up to his own ridiculous ideas, the laughter of the none too honest world, which yet respected honesty, at the hypocrisy and double-dealing of others. "They're quite right to laugh," thought Chester. "It is funny: damned funny."