He was speaking exactly as a French bourgeois speaks to the
manager of a restaurant. That is, he spoke with rattling and
breathless rapidity, but with no incoherence, and therefore with
no emotion. It was a steady, monotonous vivacity, which came not
seemingly from passion, but merely from the reason having been
sent off at a gallop. He was saying something like this:

"You refuse me my half-bottle of Medoc, the drink the most
wholesome and the most customary. You refuse me the company and
obedience of my daughter, which Nature herself indicates. You
refuse me the beef and mutton, without pretence that it is a fast
of the Church. You now forbid me the promenade, a thing necessary
to a person of my age. It is useless to tell me that you do all
this by law. Law rests upon the social contract. If the citizen
finds himself despoiled of such pleasures and powers as he would
have had even in the savage state, the social contract is
annulled."

"It's no good chattering away, Monsieur," said Hutton, for the
Master was silent. "The place is covered with machine-guns. We've
got to obey our orders, and so have you."

"The machinery is of the most perfect," assented Durand, somewhat
irrelevantly; "worked by petroleum, I believe. I only ask you to
admit that if such things fall below the comfort of barbarism,
the social contract is annulled. It is a pretty little point of
theory."

"Oh! I dare say," said Hutton.