“They don’t do a stroke more than they’re obliged,” he ended; “they know jolly well they’ve got their Unions, and their pensions, and this Insurance, to fall back on.”

It was evidently a subject on which he felt strongly.

“Yes,” he muttered, “the nation is being rotted down.”

And a faint thrill of surprise passed through me.  For the affairs of the nation moved him so much more strongly than his own.  His voice already had a different ring, his eyes a different look.  He eagerly leaned forward, and his long, straight backbone looked longer and straighter than ever.  He was less the ghost of a man.  A faint flush even had come into his pale cheeks, and he moved his well-kept hands emphatically.

“Oh, yes!” he said:  “The country is going to the dogs, right enough; but you can’t get them to see it.  They go on sapping and sapping the independence of the people.  If the working man’s to be looked after, whatever he does—­what on earth’s to become of his go, and foresight, and perseverance?”

In his rising voice a certain piquancy was left to its accent of the ruling class by that faint twang, which came, I remembered, from some slight defect in his tonsils.

“Mark my words!  So long as we’re on these lines, we shall do nothing.  It’s going against evolution.  They say Darwin’s getting old-fashioned; all I know is, he’s good enough for me.  Competition is the only thing.”

“But competition,” I said, “is bitter cruel, and some people can’t stand against it!” And I looked at him rather hard:  “Do you object to putting any sort of floor under the feet of people like that?”

He let his voice drop a little, as if in deference to my scruples.

“Ah!” he said; “but if you once begin this sort of thing, there’s no end to it.  It’s so insidious.  The more they have, the more they want; and all the time they’re losing fighting power.  I’ve thought pretty deeply about this.  It’s shortsighted; it really doesn’t do!”

“But,” I said, “surely you’re not against saving people from being knocked out of time by old age, and accidents like illness, and the fluctuations of trade?”

“Oh!” he said, “I’m not a bit against charity.  Aunt Emma’s splendid about that.  And Claud’s awfully good.  I do what I can, myself.”  He looked at me, so queerly deprecating, that I quite liked him at that moment.  At heart—­I felt he was a good fellow.  “All I think is,” he went on, “that to give them something that they can rely on as a matter of course, apart from their own exertions, is the wrong principle altogether,” and suddenly his voice began to rise again, and his eyes to stare.  “I’m convinced that all this doing things for other people, and bolstering up the weak, is rotten.  It stands to reason that it must be.”

He had risen to his feet, so preoccupied with the wrongness of that principle that he seemed to have forgotten my presence.  And as he stood there in the window the light was too strong for him.  All the thin incapacity of that shadowy figure was pitilessly displayed; the desperate narrowness in that long, pale face; the wambling look of those pale, well-kept hands—­all that made him such a ghost of a man.  But his nasal, dogmatic voice rose and rose.