"Oh, good!" said Connie. "If only there aren't more strikes!"
"What would be the use of their striking again! Merely ruin the industry, what's left of it: and surely the owls are beginning to see it!"
"Perhaps they don't mind ruining the industry," said Connie.
"Ah, don't talk like a woman! The industry fills their bellies, even if it can't keep their pockets quite so flush," he said, using turns of speech that oddly had a twang of Mrs. Bolton.
"But didn't you say the other day that you were a conservative-anarchist," she asked innocently.
"And did you understand what I meant?" he retorted. "All I meant is, people can be what they like and feel what they like and do what they like, strictly privately, so long as they keep the form of life intact, and the apparatus."
Connie walked on in silence a few paces. Then she said, obstinately:
"It sounds like saying an egg may go as addled as it likes, so long as it keeps its shell on whole. But addled eggs do break of themselves,"
"I don't think people are eggs," he said. "Not even angels' eggs, my dear little evangelist."
He was in rather high feather this bright morning. The larks were trilling away over the park, the distant pit in the hollow was fuming silent steam. It was almost like old days, before the war. Connie didn't really want to argue. But then she did not really want to go to the wood with Clifford either. So she walked beside his chair in a certain obstinacy of spirit.
"No," he said. "There will be no more strikes, if the thing is properly managed."
"Why not?"
"Because strikes will be made as good as impossible."
"But will the men let you?" she asked.
"We shan't ask them. We shall do it while they aren't looking: for their own good, to save the industry."
"For your own good too," she said.
"Naturally! For the good of everybody. But for their good even more than mine. I can live without the pits. They can't. They'll starve if there are no pits. I've got other provision."
They looked up the shallow valley at the mine, and beyond it,
