for my young mind.  Required, something from which my father abstained and in which his workmen exceeded, and which he abstained from more and more as he grew richer and richer.  The only thing that answered this description was hard work, and as I never met a sane man willing to pay another for idling, I began to see that these prodigious payments to my father were extorted by force.  To do him justice, he never boasted of abstinence.  He considered himself a hard-worked man, and claimed his fortune as the reward of his risks, his calculations, his anxieties, and the journeys he had to make at all seasons and at all hours.  This comforted me somewhat until it occurred to me that if he had lived a century earlier, invested his money in a horse and a pair of pistols, and taken to the road, his object—­that of wresting from others the fruits of their labor without rendering them an equivalent—­would have been exactly the same, and his risk far greater, for it would have included risk of the gallows.  Constant travelling with the constable at his heels, and calculations of the chances of robbing the Dover mail, would have given him his fill of activity and anxiety.  On the whole, if Jesse Trefusis, M.P., who died a millionaire in his palace at Kensington, had been a highwayman, I could not more heartily loathe the social arrangements that rendered such a career as his not only possible, but eminently creditable to himself in the eyes of his fellows.  Most men make it their business to imitate him, hoping to become rich and idle on the same terms.  Therefore I turn my back on them.  I cannot sit at their feasts knowing how much they cost in human misery, and seeing how little they produce of human happiness.  What is your opinion, my treasure?”

Henrietta seemed a little troubled.  She smiled faintly, and said caressingly, “It was not your fault, Sidney. I don’t blame you.”

“Immortal powers!” he exclaimed, sitting bolt upright and appealing to the skies, “here is a woman who believes that the only concern all this causes me is whether she thinks any the worse of me personally on account of it!”

“No, no, Sidney.  It is not I alone.  Nobody thinks the worse of you for it.”

“Quite so,” he returned, in a polite frenzy.  “Nobody sees any harm in it.  That is precisely the mischief of it.”

“Besides,” she urged, “your mother belonged to one of the oldest families in England.”

“And what more can man desire than wealth with descent from a county family!  Could a man be happier than I ought to be, sprung as I am from monopolists of all the sources and instruments of production—­of land on the one side, and of machinery on the other?  This very ground on which we are resting was the property of my mother’s father.  At least the law allowed him to use it as such.  When he was a boy, there was a fairly prosperous race of peasants settled here, tilling the soil, paying him rent for permission