Unseeingly he piped on:  “I’m happy now.  Always happy.”  He broke into thin, causeless laughter.  “When I wake up in the middle of the night, instead of feeling miserable like I used to, and remembering things that happened at Dawlish when I was a kid, and wishing I hadn’t ever been born as I wasn’t any good for anything, I just think of Jesus and feel lovely and warm.  And I’ve got earthly happiness as well.  I’ve got Poppy.  Oh, I’m a lucky man, lucky man!  And I’ve got a lifework instead of being an odd-come-short.  I’ll always have something to do now.  They’ve had experience with all sorts of men for years and years, turning them into soldiers for Jesus.  Surely they’ll be able to find some work for me, even if they don’t want me to preach.  Look at what I’m going to do now.  Even if I don’t do anything but clerk work, it’s helping the Labour Colony along—­helping hundreds of poor souls to earn a decent living under Bible influence when, if they weren’t, there they’d be, roaming about the streets hungry and in sin.  I’ll be doing my bit, won’t I, mother?”

She smiled beneficently but speechlessly.

Ellen felt contemptuous.  She had read about those Hallelujah Army Colonies for the unemployed, and had heard them denounced at labour meetings, and they were, she knew, mere palliatives by using which the pious gave themselves the pleasure of feeling that they were dealing with the immense problem of poverty when they were merely taking a few hundred men and setting them to work in uneconomic conditions.  The very consideration of them brought back the happy spasm in the throat, the flood of fire through the veins, the conviction that amidst the meadowsweet of some near field there lurked a dragon whose slaughter (which would not be difficult) would restore the earth its lost security; and all the hot, hopeful mood which filled her when she heard talk of revolution.  She hated the weak man for aggravating the offence of his unsightliness by allying himself with the reactionary powers that made this world as unsightly as himself.  And it was like him to talk about teaching the Bible when everybody knew that there were lots of things that weren’t true.  The spectacle of this mean little intelligence refusing to take cognisance of the truths that men like Darwin and Huxley had worked all their lives to discover, and faced the common hatred to proclaim, seemed to her cruel ingratitude to the great and wanton contemning of the power of thought, which was the only tool man had been given to help him break this prison of disordered society.  She leaned across the table and demanded in a heckling tone:  “But you must know pairfectly well that these Labour Colonies are only tackling the fringe of the problem.  There’s no way of settling the question of unemployment until the capitalist system’s overturned.”

He looked at her with wide eyes and assumed an air of being engaged in desperate conflict.  It was evident that his egotism was transforming this conversation into a monstrous wrestling with Apollyon.  “Ah!  You’re a Socialist.  They only think of giving people money.  But it isn’t money people need.  Oh, no.  ’What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ It’s Jesus they need.  Give them the Bible and all their wants will be satisfied,” he cried in a shrill peewit cry.