HASLAM.  Priceless. [He complies].

FRANKLYN.  Savvy has not lived long enough to have any manners, Mr Lubin; but that is where you stand with the younger generation.  Dont smoke, dear.

Savvy, with a shrug of rather mutinous resignation, throws the cigaret into the fire.  Haslam, on the point of lighting one for himself, changes his mind.

LUBIN [shrewd and serious] Mr Barnabas:  I confess I am surprised; and I will not pretend that I am convinced.  But I am open to conviction.  I may be wrong.

BURGE [in a burst of irony] Oh no.  Impossible!  Impossible!

LUBIN.  Yes, Mr Barnabas, though I do not possess Burge’s genius for being always wrong, I have been in that position once or twice.  I could not conceal from you, even if I wished to, that my time has been so completely filled by my professional work as a lawyer, and later on by my duties as leader of the House of Commons in the days when Prime Ministers were also leaders—­

BURGE [stung] Not to mention bridge and smart society.

LUBIN.—­not to mention the continual and trying effort to make Burge behave himself, that I have not been able to keep my academic reading up to date.  I have kept my classics brushed up out of sheer love for them; but my economics and my science, such as they were, may possibly be a little rusty.  Yet I think I may say that if you and your brother will be so good as to put me on the track of the necessary documents, I will undertake to put the case to the House or to the country to your entire satisfaction.  You see, as long as you can shew these troublesome half-educated people who want to turn the world upside down that they are talking nonsense, it really does not matter very much whether you do it in terms of what Miss Barnabas calls obsolete rot or in terms of what her granddaughter will probably call unmitigated tosh.  I have no objection whatever to denounce Karl Marx.  Anything I can say against Darwin will please a large body of sincerely pious voters.  If it will be easier to carry on the business of the country on the understanding that the present state of things is to be called Socialism, I have no objection in the world to call it Socialism.  There is the precedent of the Emperor Constantine, who saved the society of his own day by agreeing to call his Imperialism Christianity.  Mind:  I must not go ahead of the electorate.  You must not call a voter a Socialist until—­

FRANKLYN.  Until he is a Socialist.  Agreed.

LUBIN.  Oh, not at all.  You need not wait for that.  You must not call him a Socialist until he wishes to be called a Socialist:  that is all.  Surely you would not say that I must not address my constituents as gentlemen until they are gentlemen.  I address them as gentlemen because they wish to be so addressed. [He rises from the sofa and goes to Franklyn, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder].