'What does it feel like,' she wondered, 'to sleep sound all night on a bit of sacking, and get up in the dusk, and go into the wet fields and labour? What do these people think about? What do sheep think about, or oxen? It must be much the same thing. Wilkes, what do field-labourers think about?--you have got ever so many at home, you ought to know.'
Lady Brancepeth felt cross at being aroused and cross at having been asleep:
'Think about?' she murmured; 'oh, I don't know; beer, I believe with us, beer and bacon; here I should say francs, nothing but francs, probably. What put them in your head? And there are no labourers here in our sense of the word, you know; it is most of it _la petite culture_, you know. I never believe it is good for the soil, certainly not in the long run; it can't be; they get everything out, they put nothing in. Of course they think only of the market of the day; they don't think of the future, those people. That will be always the upshot of peasant proprietors, they will always ruin the soil.'
'What a fine thing it is to be an Englishwoman; you think of political economy and of 'the soil' the very moment that you wake out of a doze! I suppose the earth will certainly last our time; what does the rest matter?'
'You are so--so--so egotistic and autocratic, Nadine.'
'Oh, I don't know; I don't think so. I like a despotism, I was born under it; it saves so much trouble, and one big despot is very much easier to deal with than a score of little ones, especially when you stand well at his Court. It is always better to be judged by a judge instead of a jury, but simpletons will not see that.'
'But how can one judge, however just, rightfully judge a nation of millions unless he have the eyes and ears of Vishnou? I think you really are a despot by nature, but you are so very disputatious that you are always ready to repudiate your most cherished opinions for sheer sake of argument. You should have been a sophist.'
'Every question is polygonal. Look at that gleam of light on that sail and all the rest of the vessel lost in fog--how charming!--it is like a picture of Aïvanoffsky's. That is what I like in life; nothing said out, nothing broadly and rudely done, everything _à demi mot_, everything suggestion, not assertion; that is the only way to exhaust nothing, not to be wearied.'