“You can see how their condition contrasts with that of my father’s horses.  The seven men to whom I have alluded, with three hundred others, were thrown destitute upon the streets by this.” (Here he turned over a leaf and displayed a photograph of an elaborate machine.) “It enabled my father to dispense with their services, and to replace them by a handful of women and children.  He had bought the patent of the machine for fifty pounds from the inventor, who was almost ruined by the expenses of his ingenuity, and would have sacrificed anything for a handful of ready money.  Here is a portrait of my father in his masonic insignia.  He believed that freemasons generally get on in the world, and as the main object of his life was to get on, he joined them, and wanted me to do the same.  But I object to pretended secret societies and hocus pocus, and would not.  You see what he was—­a portly, pushing, egotistical tradesman.  Mark the successful man, the merchant prince with argosies on every sea, the employer of thousands of hands, the munificent contributor to public charities, the churchwarden, the member of parliament, and the generous patron of his relatives his self-approbation struggling with the instinctive sense of baseness in the money-hunter, the ignorant and greedy filcher of the labor of others, the seller of his own mind and manhood for luxuries and delicacies that he was too lowlived to enjoy, and for the society of people who made him feel his inferiority at every turn.”

“And the man to whom you owe everything you possess,” said Erskine boldly.

“I possess very little.  Everything he left me, except a few pictures, I spent long ago, and even that was made by his slaves and not by him.  My wealth comes day by day fresh from the labor of the wretches who live in the dens I have just shown you, or of a few aristocrats of labor who are within ten shillings a week of being worse off.  However, there is some excuse for my father.  Once, at an election riot, I got into a free fight.  I am a peaceful man, but as I had either to fight or be knocked down and trampled upon, I exchanged blows with men who were perhaps as peacefully disposed as I. My father, launched into a free competition (free in the sense that the fight is free:  that is, lawless)—­my father had to choose between being a slave himself and enslaving others.  He chose the latter, and as he was applauded and made much of for succeeding, who dare blame him?  Not I. Besides, he did something to destroy the anarchy that enabled him to plunder society with impunity.  He furnished me, its enemy, with the powerful weapon of a large fortune.  Thus our system of organizing industry sometimes hatches the eggs from which its destroyers break.  Does Lady Brandon wear much lace?”

“I—­No; that is—­How the deuce do I know, Trefusis?  What an extraordinary question!”