cause they’ve nothing to fall off. Can’t you see the pull it gives them?”
Randal glanced up at the virile face and the square set of the shoulders.
“What the devil does it matter, anyway?” he said. “They upset themselves—into their six feet of soil—at the end. Then the Aristocracy have the pull—with a well-dried family vault.”
“We do something toward making a New World first, though. The kind of world that doesn’t think so much of three languages and blue blood as it does of muscle and endurance and the old, old dogma that a man works for himself and a woman—one woman.”
“It will be a stupider world,” said Randal, frankly.
“It will be cleaner———.”
Father Denis exploded, flinging back his head in a great gust of laughter.
“Ah, git away wid ye an’ yer politics, Ormond. Ye’d talk the head off the Lion’s lift-poipe. Faith, ye’ve got in wan from the shouldher that toime, Randal, for all ye’ve bin sookin’ silence so long.”
It was sight of Ormond leaning against the mantel-shelf with its old china and heavy bronze candle-sticks that suddenly flicked Randal back into realisation. Far away—in town—Ormond was yet free of the clubs and of ladies’ drawing-rooms. His own feet were on
