"You truly don't? Well, I expect I'll carry on for a bit, then. I'd rather, in one way, of course, especially as we shall need all the money we can get if we ever do marry. Not that I'm saving; I spend every penny I get, I'm afraid. But of course it takes me off father's hands.... Don't _you_ feel, Miss Grammont, that all this interference with people's private lives is a mistake? It's come home to me awfully strongly lately. Only when I read the Minister's speeches I change my mind again; he puts it so rippingly, and makes me feel perhaps I'm being simply a selfish little beast. I don't care what anybody says about him, I think he's wonderful."
"My word, he jolly well _would_ despise me if he knew, wouldn't he?"
"Well...." said Kitty. And perhaps it was well that at that moment they reached Marylebone.
That conversation was typical, even as Ivy Delmer's standpoint was itself typical, of a large body of what, for lack of a better name, we must call thought, all over the country. Laws were all very well in theory, or when they only disarranged the lives of others, but when they touched and disorganised one's own life--hands off. Was the only difference between such as Ivy Delmer and such as Nicholas Chester that Ivy deceived herself ("It's not that I care a bit for myself, but it's the principle of the thing") and that Chester fell with open eyes? Which was perhaps as much as to say that Ivy was classified B3 and Chester A.
All over the country people were saying, according to their different temperaments, one or another of these things. "Of course I don't care for myself, but I think the system is wrong," or (the other way round) "It may be all right in theory, but I'm jolly well not going to stand being inconvenienced by it," or "I'm not going to stand it _and_ it's all wrong." Of course there were also those more public-spirited persons who said, "It's a splendid system and I'm going to fall in with it," or "Though it's a rotten system I suppose we must put up with it." But these were the minority.
Up till November the campaign against the Brains Ministry was quite impersonal, merely resentment against a system. It was led, in the Press, by the Labour papers, which objected to compulsion, by the _Nation_, which objected to what it, rightly or wrongly, called by that much-abused name, Prussianism, by the _New Witness_, which objected to interference with the happy stupidity of merry Gentiles (making them disagreeably clever like Jews), and by _Stop It_, which objected to everything. It was supported by the more normal organs of opinion of the kind which used before and during the war to be called conservative and liberal. And, of course, through thick and thin, by the _Hidden Hand_.