She spoke with a strong feeling; but his ear detected a new note—­something deeper and wistfuller than of old.

“Well—­as you say, you are for experiments!” he replied, not finding it easy to produce his own judgment quickly.  Then, in another tone—­“it was always Hallin’s cry.”

She glanced up at him, her lips trembling.

“I know.  Do you remember how he used to say—­’the big changes may come—­the big Collectivist changes.  But neither you nor I will see them.  I pray not to see them.  Meanwhile—­all still hangs upon, comes back to, the individual, Here are you with your money and power; there are those men and women whom you can share with—­in new and honourable ways—­to-day.’”

Then she checked herself suddenly.

“But now I want you to tell me—­will you tell me?—­all the objections you see.  You must often have thought such things over.”

She was looking nervously straight before her.  She did not see the flash of half-bitter, half-tender irony that crossed his face.  Her tone of humility, of appeal, was so strange to him, remembering the past.

“Yes, very often,” he answered.  “Well, I think these are the kind of arguments you will have to meet.”

He went through the objections that any economist would be sure to weigh against a proposal of the kind, as clearly as he could, and at some length—­but without zest.  What affected Marcella all through was not so much the matter of what he said, as the manner of it.  It was so characteristic of the two voices in him—­the voice of the idealist checked and mocked always by the voice of the observer and the student.  A year before, the little harangue would have set her aflame with impatience and wrath.  Now, beneath the speaker, she felt and yearned towards the man.

Yet, as to the scheme, when all demurs were made, she was “of the same opinion still”!  His arguments were not new to her; the inward eagerness over-rode them.

“In my own case”—­he said at last, the tone passing instantly into reserve and shyness, as always happened when he spoke of himself—­“my own wages are two or three shillings higher than those paid generally by the farmers on the estate; and we have a pension fund.  But so far, I have felt the risks of any wholesale disturbance of labour on the estate, depending, as it must entirely in my case, on the individual life and will, to be too great to let me go further.  I sometimes believe that it is the farmers who would really benefit most by experiments of the kind!”

She protested vehemently, being at the moment, of course, not at all in love with mankind in general, but only with those members of mankind who came within the eye of imagination.  He was enchanted to see the old self come out again—­positive, obstinate, generous; to see the old confident pose of the head, the dramatic ease of gesture.

Meanwhile something that had to be said, that must, indeed, be said, if he were to give her serious and official advice, pressed uncomfortably on his tongue.