“No; but when you talk of his directing other people, you forget that he is doing what they couldn’t.”

“He may be doing what they couldn’t; but ordinary directive ability is not born in a man; it’s acquired by habit and training.  Suppose fortune had reversed them at birth, the Gaunt or Tryst would by now have it and the Malloring would not.  The accident that they were not reversed at birth has given the Malloring a thousandfold advantage.”

“It’s no joke directing things,” muttered Stanley.

“No work is any joke; but I just put it to you:  Simply as work, without taking in the question of reward, would you dream for a minute of swapping your work with the work of one of your workmen?  No.  Well, neither would a Malloring with one of his Gaunts.  So that, my boy, for work which is intrinsically more interesting and pleasurable, the Malloring gets a hundred to a thousand times more money.”

“All this is rank socialism, my dear fellow.”

“No; rank truth.  Now, to take the life of a Gaunt.  He gets up summer and winter much earlier out of a bed that he cannot afford time or money to keep too clean or warm, in a small room that probably has not a large enough window; into clothes stiff with work and boots stiff with clay; makes something hot for himself, very likely brings some of it to his wife and children; goes out, attending to his digestion crudely and without comfort; works with his hands and feet from half past six or seven in the morning till past five at night, except that twice he stops for an hour or so and eats simple things that he would not altogether have chosen to eat if he could have had his will.  He goes home to a tea that has been got ready for him, and has a clean-up without assistance, smokes a pipe of shag, reads a newspaper perhaps two days old, and goes out again to work for his own good, in his vegetable patch, or to sit on a wooden bench in an atmosphere of beer and ‘baccy.’  And so, dead tired, but not from directing other people, he drowses himself to early lying again in his doubtful bed.  Is that exaggerated?”

“I suppose not, but he—­”

“Has his compensations:  Clean conscience—­freedom from worry—­fresh air, all the rest of it!  I know.  Clean conscience granted, but so has your Malloring, it would seem.  Freedom from worry—­yes, except when a pair of boots is wanted, or one of the children is ill; then he has to make up for lost time with a vengeance.  Fresh air—­and wet clothes, with a good chance of premature rheumatism.  Candidly, which of those two lives demands more of the virtues on which human life is founded—­courage and patience, hardihood and self-sacrifice?  And which of two men who have lived those two lives well has most right to the word ’superior’?”

Stanley dropped the Review and for fully a minute paced the room without reply.  Then he said: 

“Felix, you’re talking flat revolution.”