’There isn’t a great deal to it.  A lot of ignorance, a large slice of vanity, and a pinch or two of wrong-headed honesty—­these are the ingredients of the pie.  Not much real harm in it.  There’s one or two dirty literary gents who should be in a navvies’ battalion, but they’re about as dangerous as yellow Kaffir dogs.  I’ve learned a lot and got all the arguments by heart, but you might plant a Biggleswick in every shire and it wouldn’t help the Boche.  I can see where the danger lies all the same.  These fellows talked academic anarchism, but the genuine article is somewhere about and to find it you’ve got to look in the big industrial districts.  We had faint echoes of it in Biggleswick.  I mean that the really dangerous fellows are those who want to close up the war at once and so get on with their blessed class war, which cuts across nationalities.  As for being spies and that sort of thing, the Biggleswick lads are too callow.’

‘Yes,’ said Blenkiron reflectively.  ’They haven’t got as much sense as God gave to geese.  You’re sure you didn’t hit against any heavier metal?’

’Yes.  There’s a man called Launcelot Wake, who came down to speak once.  I had met him before.  He has the makings of a fanatic, and he’s the more dangerous because you can see his conscience is uneasy.  I can fancy him bombing a Prime Minister merely to quiet his own doubts.’

‘So,’ he said.  ‘Nobody else?’

I reflected.  ’There’s Mr Ivery, but you know him better than I. I shouldn’t put much on him, but I’m not precisely certain, for I never had a chance of getting to know him.’

‘Ivery,’ said Blenkiron in surprise.  ’He has a hobby for half-baked youth, just as another rich man might fancy orchids or fast trotters.  You sure can place him right enough.’

‘I dare say.  Only I don’t know enough to be positive.’

He sucked at his cigar for a minute or so.  ’I guess, Dick, if I told you all I’ve been doing since I reached these shores you would call me a romancer.  I’ve been way down among the toilers.  I did a spell as unskilled dilooted labour in the Barrow shipyards.  I was barman in a hotel on the Portsmouth Road, and I put in a black month driving a taxicab in the city of London.  For a while I was the accredited correspondent of the Noo York Sentinel and used to go with the rest of the bunch to the pow-wows of under-secretaries of State and War Office generals.  They censored my stuff so cruel that the paper fired me.  Then I went on a walking-tour round England and sat for a fortnight in a little farm in Suffolk.  By and by I came back to Claridge’s and this bookshop, for I had learned most of what I wanted.

‘I had learned,’ he went on, turning his curious, full, ruminating eyes on me, ’that the British working-man is about the soundest piece of humanity on God’s earth.  He grumbles a bit and jibs a bit when he thinks the Government are giving him a crooked deal, but he’s gotten the patience of Job and the sand of a gamecock.  And he’s gotten humour too, that tickles me to death.  There’s not much trouble in that quarter for it’s he and his kind that’s beating the Hun . . .  But I picked up a thing or two besides that.’