“Only an engine and gas!” said Clifford.
“I hope I can have some repairs done to the old place next year. I think I shall have about a thousand to spare for that: but work costs so much!” he added.
“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.