“No.  I don’t agree with you, Leadford,” he said.  “You don’t understand about science.”

Parload rarely argued with that bluntness of opposition.  I was so used to entire possession of our talk that his brief contradiction struck me like a blow.  “Don’t agree with me!” I repeated.

“No,” said Parload

“But how?”

“I believe science is of more importance than socialism,” he said.  “Socialism’s a theory.  Science—­science is something more.”

And that was really all he seemed to be able to say.

We embarked upon one of those queer arguments illiterate young men used always to find so heating.  Science or Socialism?  It was, of course, like arguing which is right, left handedness or a taste for onions, it was altogether impossible opposition.  But the range of my rhetoric enabled me at last to exasperate Parload, and his mere repudiation of my conclusions sufficed to exasperate me, and we ended in the key of a positive quarrel.  “Oh, very well!” said I.  “So long as I know where we are!”

I slammed his door as though I dynamited his house, and went raging down the street, but I felt that he was already back at the window worshiping his blessed line in the green, before I got round the corner.

I had to walk for an hour or so, before I was cool enough to go home.

And it was Parload who had first introduced me to socialism!

Recreant!

The most extraordinary things used to run through my head in those days.  I will confess that my mind ran persistently that evening upon revolutions after the best French pattern, and I sat on a Committee of Safety and tried backsliders.  Parload was there, among the prisoners, backsliderissimus, aware too late of the error of his ways.  His hands were tied behind his back ready for the shambles; through the open door one heard the voice of justice, the rude justice of the people.  I was sorry, but I had to do my duty.

“If we punish those who would betray us to Kings,” said I, with a sorrowful deliberation, “how much the more must we punish those who would give over the State to the pursuit of useless knowledge”; and so with a gloomy satisfaction sent him off to the guillotine.

“Ah, Parload!  Parload!  If only you’d listened to me earlier, Parload. . . .”

None the less that quarrel made me extremely unhappy.  Parload was my only gossip, and it cost me much to keep away from him and think evil of him with no one to listen to me, evening after evening.

That was a very miserable time for me, even before my last visit to Checkshill.  My long unemployed hours hung heavily on my hands.  I kept away from home all day, partly to support a fiction that I was sedulously seeking another situation, and partly to escape the persistent question in my mother’s eyes.  “Why did you quarrel with Mr. Rawdon?  Why did you?  Why do you keep on going about with a sullen face and risk offending it more?”