‘I should have told you, Nevil, by the way, that the earl is dead,’ said Rosamund.

‘Her brother will be here to-day; he can’t be later than the evening,’ said Beauchamp.  ’Get her to eat, ma’am; you must.  Command her to eat.  This terrible starvation!’

‘You ate nothing yourself, Nevil, all day yesterday.’

He surveyed the table.  ’You have your cook in town, I see.  Here’s a breakfast to feed twenty hungry families in Spitalfields.  Where does the mass of meat go?  One excess feeds another.  You’re overdone with servants.  Gluttony, laziness, and pilfering come of your host of unmanageable footmen and maids; you stuff them, and wonder they’re idle and immoral.  If—­I suppose I must call him the earl now, or Colonel Halkett, or any one of the army of rich men, hear of an increase of the income-tax, or some poor wretch hints at a sliding scale of taxation, they yell as if they were thumb-screwed:  but five shillings in the pound goes to the kitchen as a matter of course—­to puff those pompous idiots! and the parsons, who should be preaching against this sheer waste of food and perversion of the strength of the nation, as a public sin, are maundering about schism.  There’s another idle army!  Then we have artists, authors, lawyers, doctors—­the honourable professions! all hanging upon wealth, all ageing the rich, and all bearing upon labour! it’s incubus on incubus.  In point of fact, the rider’s too heavy for the horse in England.’

He began to nibble at bread.

Rosamund pushed over to him a plate of the celebrated Steynham pie, of her own invention, such as no douse in the county of Sussex could produce or imitate.

‘What would you have the parsons do?’ she said.

’Take the rich by the throat and show them in the kitchen-mirror that they’re swine running down to the sea with a devil in them.’  She had set him off again, but she had enticed him to eating.  ’Pooh! it has all been said before.  Stones are easier to move than your English.  May I be forgiven for saying it! an invasion is what they want to bring them to their senses.  I’m sick of the work.  Why should I be denied—­am I to kill the woman I love that I may go on hammering at them?  Their idea of liberty is, an evasion of public duty.  Dr. Shrapnel’s right—­it’s a money-logged Island!  Men like the Earl of Romfrey, who have never done work in their days except to kill bears and birds, I say they’re stifled by wealth:  and he at least would have made an Admiral of mark, or a General:  not of much value, but useful in case of need.  But he, like a pretty woman, was under no obligation to contribute more than an ornamental person to the common good.  As to that, we count him by tens of thousands now, and his footmen and maids by hundreds of thousands.  The rich love the nation through their possessions; otherwise they have no country.  If they loved the country they would care for the people.  Their hearts are eaten