by a sound of voices, and found Lady Marayne had been up still earlier and was dismounting from a large effective black horse.  This extorted an unwilling admiration from him.  She greeted him very pleasantly and made a kind of introduction of her steed.  There had been trouble at a gate, he was a young horse and fidgeted at gates; the dispute was still bright in her.  Benham she declared was still in bed.  “Wait till I have a mount for him.”  She reappeared fitfully in the breakfast-room, and then he was left to Benham until just before lunch.  They read and afterwards, as the summer day grew hot, they swam in the nude pond.  She joined them in the water, splashing about in a costume of some elaboration and being very careful not to wet her hair.  Then she came and sat with them on the seat under the big cedar and talked with them in a wrap that was pretty rather than prudish and entirely unmotherly.  And she began a fresh attack upon him by asking him if he wasn’t a Socialist and whether he didn’t want to pull down Chexington and grow potatoes all over the park.

This struck Prothero as an inadequate statement of the Socialist project and he made an unsuccessful attempt to get it amended.

The engagement thus opened was renewed with great energy at lunch.  Sir Godfrey had returned to London and the inmost aspect of his fellow-creatures, but the party of three was supplemented by a vague young lady from the village and an alert agent from the neighbouring Tentington estate who had intentions about a cottage.  Lady Marayne insisted upon regarding Socialism as a proposal to reinaugurate the first French Revolution, as an inversion of society so that it would be bottom upward, as an attack upon rule, order, direction.  “And what good are all these proposals?  If you had the poor dear king beheaded, you’d only get a Napoleon.  If you divided all the property up between everybody, you’d have rich and poor again in a year.”

Billy perceived no way of explaining away this version of his Socialism that would not involve uncivil contradictions—­and nobody ever contradicted Lady Marayne.

“But, Lady Marayne, don’t you think there is a lot of disorder and injustice in the world?” he protested.

“There would be ever so much more if your Socialists had their way.”

“But still, don’t you think—­ . . .”

It is unnecessary even to recapitulate these universal controversies of our time.  The lunch-table and the dinner-table and the general talk of the house drifted more and more definitely at its own level in the same direction as the private talk of Prothero and Benham, towards the antagonism of the privileged few and the many, of the trained and traditioned against the natural and undisciplined, of aristocracy against democracy.  At the week-end Sir Godfrey returned to bring fresh elements.  He said that democracy was unscientific.  “To deny aristocracy is to deny the existence of the fittest.  It is on the existence of the fittest that progress depends.”