“I tell tha he’s playin’ for his own hand!” said Wilkins, doggedly, the red spot deepening on his swarthy cheek—­“he’s runnin’ that paper for his own hand—­Haven’t I had experience of him?  I know it—­And I’ll prove it some day!  He’s one for featherin’ his own nest is Mr. Wharton—­and when he’s doon it by makkin’ fools of us, he’ll leave us to whistle for any good we’re iver likely to get out o’ him.  He go agen the landlords when it coom to the real toossle,—­I know ’em—­I tell tha—­I know ’em!”

A woman’s voice, clear and scornful, broke into the talk.

“It’s a little strange to think, isn’t it, that while we in London go on groaning and moaning about insanitary houses, and making our small attempts here and there, half of the country poor of England have been re-housed in our generation by these same landlords—­no fuss about it—­and rents for five-roomed cottages, somewhere about one and fourpence a week!”

Hallin swung his chair round and looked at the speaker—­amazed!

Wilkins also stared at her under his eyebrows.  He did not like women—­least of all, ladies.

He gruffly replied that if they had done anything like as much as she said—­which, he begged her pardon, but he didn’t believe—­it was done for the landlords’ own purposes, either to buy off public opinion, or just for show and aggrandisement.  People who had prize pigs and prize cattle must have prize cottages of course—­“with a race of slaves inside ’em!”

Marcella, bright-eyed, erect, her thin right hand hanging over her knee, went avengingly into facts—­the difference between landlords’ villages and “open” villages; the agrarian experiments made by different great landlords; the advantage to the community, even from the Socialist point of view of a system which had preserved the land in great blocks, for the ultimate use of the State, as compared with a system like the French, which had for ever made Socialism impossible.

Hallin’s astonishment almost swept away his weariness.

“Where in the world did she get it all from, and is she standing on her head or am I?”

After an animated little debate, in which Bennett and the two workmen joined, while Wilkins sat for the most part in moody, contemptuous silence, and Marcella, her obstinacy roused, carried through her defence of the landlords with all a woman’s love of emphasis and paradox, everybody rose simultaneously to say good-night.

“You ought to come and lead a debate down at our Limehouse club,” said Bennett pleasantly to Marcella, as she held out her hand to him; “you’d take a lot of beating.”

“Yet I’m a Venturist, you know,” she said, laughing; “I am.”

He shook his head, laughed too, and departed.

When the four had gone, Marcella turned upon Hallin.

“Are there many of these Labour members like that?”

Her tone was still vibrating and sarcastic.