"I enjoyed myself all the time," he said. "It was splendid!" "That was good. And did you learn anything?" "Nothing much from our talking. But I think I understand about the mystery." "I thought Paris might drive it home; it used to smell so in August. Does it still?" "In places." The scent of fir-trees came to him on the summer breeze. "I do see really," he added, almost pleadingly. "I'm glad for your own sake. It's as well to look at the future. You may have to go to India. That may mean the end of books and talking and ideas. But you'll get reasonable pay and occasional leave and then you won't feel like anything but shooting and fishing. And perhaps when you're fifty or so you'll struggle back to this kind of existence. I assure you there's something in it all. And once you've dropped your philosophy of this and art of that for thirty years they won't come back. Ham and Eggs will be your only deity. But it isn't merely carnal." "I see that," Martin replied. Somehow the future did not seem so ugly to Martin as he stood watching the young moon hanging lightly over the dark shoulder of the moor. It would be good to come back and worship the goddess in Devonshire. "Thanks for the initiation," he said as they turned back to the house. V "The' being no fur' questions, much pleasure call on Mr Leigh for his paper on Industrialism and the Home." (_Mild applause._) The members of the King's Essay Society were scattered about Martin's rooms, lounging in window-seats or strewn on the floor. The air was thick with smoke, the carpet invisible by reason of the mingled feet, tobacco, coffee-cups, books, and crystallised fruit. The Push were present in force, and Lawrence, larger than ever, lounged on the sofa and smoked a cigar with ungainly opulence. Martin, from his seat by the reading-lamp, began to inform them about the home. He started philosophically, taking as his text the assertion that voluntary associations are always preferable to compulsory grouping and that it should be our object to restrict such compulsion as far as possible. The home is a compulsory association and its sphere must be limited. He pointed out that since the whole trend of industrialism had been to invade the home, to capture the women and to drag them out to wage-slavery, it was irrational to stop in the present position. The home must be either a real thing where women were free from the direct clutches of capitalism and made up for indirect economic dependence by freedom from drudgery in offices and factories, or else we must be logical and complete the tendency by industrialising the home. This process would of course destroy the home as at present understood. But it would substitute for the present compulsory group a voluntary association: and this he would welcome because the home of to-day was not only a compulsory but a fundamentally rotten institution. (_Loud applause from emancipated young men._)