‘It seems to me they’re a bad boss,’ she said.

‘Then you suggest what they should do.’

‘They don’t take their boss–ship seriously enough,’ she said.

‘They take it far more seriously than you take your ladyship,’ he said.

‘That’s thrust upon me. I don’t really want it,’ she blurted out. He stopped the chair and looked at her.

‘Who’s shirking their responsibility now!’ he said. ‘Who is trying to get away NOW from the responsibility of their own boss–ship, as you call it?’

‘But I don’t want any boss–ship,’ she protested.

‘Ah! But that is funk. You’ve got it: fated to it. And you should live up to it. Who has given the colliers all they have that’s worth having: all their political liberty, and their education, such as it is, their sanitation, their health–conditions, their books, their music, everything. Who has given it them? Have colliers given it to colliers? No! All the Wragbys and Shipleys in England have given their part, and must go on giving. There’s your responsibility.’

Connie listened, and flushed very red.

‘I’d like to give something,’ she said. ‘But I’m not allowed. Everything is to be sold and paid for now; and all the things you mention now, Wragby and Shipley SELLS them to the people, at a good prof it. Everything is sold. You don’t give one heart–beat of real sympathy. And besides, who has taken away from the people their natural life and manhood, and given them this industrial horror? Who has done that?’

‘And what must I do?’ he asked, green. ‘Ask them to come and pillage me?’

‘Why is Tevershall so ugly, so hideous? Why are their lives so hopeless?’

‘They built their own Tevershall, that’s part of their display of freedom. They built themselves their pretty Tevershall, and they live their own pretty lives. I can’t live their lives for them. Every beetle must live its own life.’

‘But you make them work for you. They live the life of your coal–mine.’

‘Not at all. Every beetle finds its own food. Not one man is forced to work for me.

‘Their lives are industrialized and hopeless, and so are ours,’ she cried.

‘I don’t think they are. That’s just a romantic figure of speech, a relic of the swooning and die–away romanticism. You don’t look at all a hopeless figure standing there, Connie my dear.’

Which was true. For her dark–blue eyes were flashing, her colour was hot in her cheeks, she looked full of a rebellious passion far from the dejection of hopelessness. She noticed, ill the tussocky places of the grass, cottony young cowslips standing up still bleared in their down. And she wondered with rage, why it was she felt Clifford was so WRONG, yet she couldn’t say it to him, she could not say exactly WHERE he was wrong.