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finished with all the dirty, discreditable, necessary work that underlies every civilization, you’ll bring your mops and pails and tidy up! You do, I grant you, keep us much cleaner on the surface, here in Europe; but just as much foulness and iniquity seethes underneath as in India; and there’s no hope of a warrior tribe to wipe us out.’

‘Are the warrior tribes so just and upright?’ Monica was a little disconcerted. There was a snarl perceptible beneath the supple surfaces of her tiger’s good manners and she wondered if he might become, in his hostility towards life, a little unmanageable.

‘They are clean in comparison with us; there’s that to be said for them,’ said Ingpen, while Clive, helping himself to fish, glanced at him coldly.

‘They have evolved no sewers and no sewer-rats. The moment you get civilization—or, in other words, sewers—you get sewer-rats. What happens to our civilization, I suppose, is not the warrior-tribes, but the sewer-rat;—as we see in Russia.’

‘Our rats will find us a more difficult mouthful,’ Clive commented, frostily smiling, and at that Hester spoke, raising her head and fixing her eyes upon her husband: ‘And who do you mean by rat?’ she enquired. ‘Oppressed people? Exploited