“There isn’t one,” said Sir Richmond.  “It is my chief discovery about life.  I began with the question of fuel and the energy it affords mankind, and I have found that my generalization applies to all human affairs.  Human beings are fools, weaklings, cowards, passionate idiots,—­I grant you.  That is the brown cloak side of them, so to speak.  But they are not such fools and so forth that they can’t do pretty well materially if once we hammer out a sane collective method of getting and using fuel.  Which people generally will understand—­in the place of our present methods of snatch and wrangle.  Of that I am absolutely convinced.  Some work, some help, some willingness you can get out of everybody.  That’s the red.  And the same principle applies to most labour and property problems, to health, to education, to population, social relationships and war and peace.  We haven’t got the right system, we have inefficient half-baked systems, or no system at all, and a wild confusion and war of ideas in all these respects.  But there is a right system possible none the less.  Let us only hammer our way through to the sane and reasonable organization in this and that and the other human affairs, and once we have got it, we shall have got it for good.  We may not live to see even the beginnings of success, but the spirit of order, the spirit that has already produced organized science, if only there are a few faithful, persistent people to stick to the job, will in the long run certainly save mankind and make human life clean and splendid, happy work in a clear mind.  If I could live to see it!”

“And as for us—­in our time?”

“Measured by the end we serve, we don’t matter.  You know we don’t matter.”

“We have to find our fun in the building and in our confidence that we do really build.”

“So long as our confidence lasts there is no great hardship,” said Sir Richmond.

“So long as our confidence lasts,” she repeated after him.

“Ah!” cried Sir Richmond.  “There it is!  So long as our confidence lasts!  So long as one keeps one’s mind steady.  That is what I came away with Dr. Martineau to discuss.  I went to him for advice.  I haven’t known him for more than a month.  It’s amusing to find myself preaching forth to you.  It was just faith I had lost.  Suddenly I had lost my power of work.  My confidence in the rightness of what I was doing evaporated.  My will failed me.  I don’t know if you will understand what that means.  It wasn’t that my reason didn’t assure me just as certainly as ever that what I was trying to do was the right thing to try to do.  But somehow that seemed a cold and personally unimportant proposition.  The life had gone out of it....”

He paused as if arrested by a momentary doubt.

“I don’t know why I tell you these things,” he said.

“You tell them me,” she said.

“It’s a little like a patient in a hydropath retailing his ailments.”