Graham did not answer immediately. He stood lost in sombre preoccupations.
"No," said Ostrog. "The day of the common man is past. On the open countryside one man is as good as another, or nearly as good. The earlier aristocracy had a precarious tenure of strength and audacity. They were tempered—tempered. There were insurrections, duels, riots. The first real aristocracy, the first permanent aristocracy, came in with castles and armour, and vanished before the musket and bow. But this is the second aristocracy. The real one. Those days of gunpowder and democracy were only an eddy in the stream. The common man now is a helpless unit. In these days we have this great machine of the city, and an organisation complex beyond his understanding."
"Yes," said Graham, "there is something resists, something you are holding down—something that stirs and presses."
"You will see," said Ostrog, with a forced smile that would brush these difficult questions aside. "I have not roused the force to destroy myself—trust me."
"I wonder," said Graham.
Ostrog stared.
"Must the world go this way?" said Graham, with his emotions at the speaking point. "Must it indeed go in this way? Have all our hopes been vain?"
"What do you mean?" said Ostrog. "Hopes?"
"I came from a democratic age. And I find an aristocratic tyranny!"
"Well,—but you are the chief tyrant."
Graham shook his head.
"Well," said Ostrog, "take the general question. It is the way that change has always travelled. Aristocracy, the prevalence of the best—the suffering and extinction of the unfit, and so to better things."
"But aristocracy! those people I met"
"Oh! not those!" said Ostrog. "But for the most
