discontent of the many with the few, under any conditions, so long as it was a formula for class jealousy and warfare, they were both repelled by it.  If she had had any illusions about the working class possessing as a class any profounder political wisdom or more generous public impulses than any other class, those illusions had long since departed.  People were much the same, she thought, in every class; there was no stratification of either rightness or righteousness.

He found he could talk to her of his work and aims upon the Fuel Commission and of the conflict and failure of motives he found in himself, as freely as he had done to Dr. Martineau and with a surer confidence of understanding.  Perhaps his talks with the doctor had got his ideas into order and made them more readily expressible than they would have been otherwise.  He argued against the belief that any class could be good as a class or bad as a class, and he instanced the conflict of motives he found in all the members of his Committee and most so in himself.  He repeated the persuasion he had already confessed to Dr. Martineau that there was not a single member of the Fuel Commission but had a considerable drive towards doing the right thing about fuel, and not one who had a single-minded, unencumbered drive towards the right thing.  “That,” said Sir Richmond, “is what makes life so interesting and, in spite of a thousand tragic disappointments, so hopeful.  Every man is a bad man, every man is a feeble man and every man is a good man.  My motives come and go.  Yours do the same.  We vary in response to the circumstances about us.  Given a proper atmosphere, most men will be public-spirited, right-living, generous.  Given perplexities and darkness, most of us can be cowardly and vile.  People say you cannot change human nature and perhaps that is true, but you can change its responses endlessly.  The other day I was in Bohemia, discussing Silesian coal with Benes, and I went to see the Festival of the Bohemian Sokols.  Opposite to where I sat, far away across the arena, was a great bank of men of the Sokol organizations, an unbroken brown mass wrapped in their brown uniform cloaks.  Suddenly the sun came out and at a word the whole body flung back their cloaks, showed their Garibaldi shirts and became one solid blaze of red.  It was an amazing transformation until one understood what had happened.  Yet nothing material had changed but the sunshine.  And given a change in laws and prevailing ideas, and the very same people who are greedy traders, grasping owners and revolting workers to-day will all throw their cloaks aside and you will find them working together cheerfully, even generously, for a common end.  They aren’t traders and owners and workers and so forth by any inner necessity.  Those are just the ugly parts they play in the present drama.  Which is nearly at the end of its run.”

“That’s a hopeful view,” said Miss Grammont.  “I don’t see the flaw in it—­if there is a flaw.”