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It was hard to say whether he was relieved or not when there was evidently a vehement altercation in German between the Duke and a tough, grizzled old knight, the upshot of which turned out to be that the Ritter Gebhardt von Fuchstein absolutely refused to proceed through those pine and beech forests so late in the day; since it would be only too easy to lose the way, and there might be ambuscades or the like if Balchenburg and his crew were on the watch, and there was no doubt that they were allied with all the rentiers in the country.

Penchard is the town in which the Germans exercised their taste for wilful nastiness, of which I wrote you weeks ago. It is a pretty little village, beautifully situated, commanding the slopes to the Marne on one side, and the wide plains of Barcy and Chambry on the other. It is prosperous looking, the home of sturdy farmers and the small rentiers.

America has plenty of poor loafers, but few wealthy rentiers who spend their days in bed or in idleness, and are therefore insatiable in their appetite for entertainment in the evening. The typical American works hard all day long, whether he is rich or poor, and in the evening his brain is too tired to follow for four hours the complicated orchestral score of a music-drama.

And so while I hear plenty of talk about the great reorganisations that are to come after the war, while there is the stir of doubt among the rentiers whether, after all, they will get paid, while the unavoidable stresses and sacrifices of the war are making many people question the rightfulness of much that they did as a matter of course, and of much that they took for granted, I perceive there is also something dull and not very articulate in this European world, something resistant and inert, that is like the obstinate rolling over of a heavy sleeper after he has been called upon to get up.

Social stability and mass support come from an extensive middle class composed of public servants and body servants, small tradesmen, self-employed craftsmen, rentiers and retired persons who are assured body comforts, social recognition and preferment for themselves, their relatives and dependants.

By 1926 we shall be going about a world that will have recovered very largely from the impoverishment of the struggle; we shall tour in State-manufactured automobiles upon excellent roads, and we shall live in houses equipped with a national factory electric light installation, and at every turn we shall be using and consuming the products of nationalised industry and paying off the National Debt simultaneously, and reducing our burden of rentiers.

The so-called labour papers are perhaps less representative of British Labour than any other section of the press; the Labour Leader, for example, is the organ of such people as Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee, Morel, academic rentiers who know about as much as of the labour side of industrialism as they do of cock-fighting.

Admirable, too, were the fortitude and resignation of the genuine Parisian bourgeoisie, the thrifty tradesfolk and small rentiers, that class in which, to judge of its timidity when opposed to a mob, courage is not the most conspicuous virtue.

But besides protecting these women, he had a still more sacred duty to perform that of succoring his accomplice, if possible. He retraced his steps, passed by here once more, and the last footprint that I can discover leads in the direction of the Rue du Chateau des Rentiers.

Admirable, too, were the fortitude and resignation of the genuine Parisian bourgeoisie, the thrifty tradesfolk and small rentiers, that class in which, to judge of its timidity when opposed to a mob, courage is not the most conspicuous virtue.