Raymond admitted so much and agreed that the world had yet to learn what it might achieve under a nobler dispensation of freedom.

“Think of the art, the thought, the leisure for good things, if the ceaseless fight against bad things were only ended; think of the inspirations that personality will be free to express some day,” she said.

But he shattered her dreams sometimes.  She would never suffer him to declare any advance impossible; yet she had to listen, when he explained that countless things she cried for were impracticable under existing circumstances.

“You want to get to the goal without running the race, sweetheart,” he told her once.  “Before this and this can possibly happen, that and that must happen.  House-building begins at the cellars, not the roof.”

She wrestled with political economy and its bearings on all that was meant by democracy.  She was patient and strove to master detail and keep within the domain of reality.  But, after all, she taught him more than he could teach her; because her thoughts sprung from an imagination touched with genius, while he was contented to take things as he found them and distrust emotion and intuition.

She exploded ideas in the ordered chambers of his mind.  The proposition that labour was not a commodity quite took him off his balance.  Yet he proved too logical to deny it when Estelle convinced his reason.

“That fact belongs to the root of all the future, I believe,” she said.  “From it all the flowers and seed we hope for ought to come, and the interpretation of everything vital.  Labour and the labourer aren’t two different things; they’re one and the same thing.  His labour is part of every man, and it can no more be measured and calculated away from him than his body and soul can.  But it is the body and soul that must regulate labour, not labour the body and soul.  So you’ve got to regard labour and the rights of labour as part of the rights of man, and not a thing to be bought and sold like a pound of tea.  You see that?  Labour, in fact, is as sacred as humanity and its rights are sacred too.”

“So are the rights of property,” he answered, but doubtfully, for he knew at heart that the one proposition did not by any means embrace the other.  Indeed Estelle contradicted him very forcibly.

“Not the least bit in the world,” she declared.  “They are as far apart as the poles.  There’s nothing the least sacred about property.  The rights of property are casual.  They generally depend on all sorts of things that don’t matter.  They happen through the changes and chances of life, and human whims and fads and the pure accident of heredity and descent.  They are all on a lower level; they are all suspect, whereas the rights of labour are a part of humanity.”

But he followed her parry with a sharp riposte.

“Remember what happened when somebody promised to marry me,” he said.  “Remember that, as a principle of rectitude, I have recognised my son and accepted your very ‘accident of descent’ as chief reason for according him all a first-born’s rights.  That was your instinct towards right—­his rights of property.”