“It could be done with a little good will all round,” he continued, “and nine men out of every ten would be the better off.  But they won’t even let you explain.  Their newspapers shout you down.  It’s such a damned fine world for the few:  never mind the many.  My father was a farm labourer:  and all his life he never earned more than thirteen and sixpence a week.  I left when I was twelve and went into the mines.  There were six of us children; and my mother brought us up healthy and decent.  She fed us and clothed us and sent us to school; and when she died we buried her with the money she had put by for the purpose; and never a penny of charity had ever soiled her hands.  I can see them now.  Talk of your Chancellors of the Exchequer and their problems!  She worked herself to death, of course.  Well, that’s all right.  One doesn’t mind that where one loves.  If they would only let you.  She had no opposition to contend with—­no thwarting and hampering at every turn—­the very people you are working for hounded on against you.  The difficulty of a man like myself, who wants to do something, who could do something, is that for the best part of his life he is fighting to be allowed to do it.  By the time I’ve lived down their lies and got my chance, my energy will be gone.”

He knocked the ashes from his pipe and relit it.

“I’ve no quarrel with the rich,” he said.  “I don’t care how many rich men there are, so long as there are no poor.  Who does?  I was riding on a bus the other day, and there was a man beside me with a bandaged head.  He’d been hurt in that railway smash at Morpeth.  He hadn’t claimed damages from the railway company and wasn’t going to.  ’Oh, it’s only a few scratches,’ he said.  ‘They’ll be hit hard enough as it is.’  If he’d been a poor devil on eighteen shillings a week it would have been different.  He was an engineer earning good wages; so he wasn’t feeling sore and bitter against half the world.  Suppose you tried to run an army with your men half starved while your officers had more than they could eat.  It’s been tried and what’s been the result?  See that your soldiers have their proper rations, and the General can sit down to his six-course dinner, if he will.  They are not begrudging it to him.

“A nation works on its stomach.  Underfeed your rank and file, and what sort of a fight are you going to put up against your rivals.  I want to see England going ahead.  I want to see her workers properly fed.  I want to see the corn upon her unused acres, the cattle grazing on her wasted pastures.  I object to the food being thrown into the sea—­left to rot upon the ground while men are hungry—­side-tracked in Chicago, while the children grow up stunted.  I want the commissariat properly organized.”

He had been staring through her rather than at her, so it had seemed to Joan.  Suddenly their eyes met, and he broke into a smile.

“I’m so awfully sorry,” he said.  “I’ve been talking to you as if you were a public meeting.  I’m afraid I’m more used to them than I am to women.  Please forgive me.”