“I’ll wager Dr. Hammerfield was never up against anything like it in his life,” he laughed. “‘The courtesies of ecclesiastical controversy!’ Did you notice how he began like a lamb—­Everhard, I mean, and how quickly he became a roaring lion?  He has a splendidly disciplined mind.  He would have made a good scientist if his energies had been directed that way.”

I need scarcely say that I was deeply interested in Ernest Everhard.  It was not alone what he had said and how he had said it, but it was the man himself.  I had never met a man like him.  I suppose that was why, in spite of my twenty-four years, I had not married.  I liked him; I had to confess it to myself.  And my like for him was founded on things beyond intellect and argument.  Regardless of his bulging muscles and prize-fighter’s throat, he impressed me as an ingenuous boy.  I felt that under the guise of an intellectual swashbuckler was a delicate and sensitive spirit.  I sensed this, in ways I knew not, save that they were my woman’s intuitions.

There was something in that clarion-call of his that went to my heart.  It still rang in my ears, and I felt that I should like to hear it again—­and to see again that glint of laughter in his eyes that belied the impassioned seriousness of his face.  And there were further reaches of vague and indeterminate feelings that stirred in me.  I almost loved him then, though I am confident, had I never seen him again, that the vague feelings would have passed away and that I should easily have forgotten him.

But I was not destined never to see him again.  My father’s new-born interest in sociology and the dinner parties he gave would not permit.  Father was not a sociologist.  His marriage with my mother had been very happy, and in the researches of his own science, physics, he had been very happy.  But when mother died, his own work could not fill the emptiness.  At first, in a mild way, he had dabbled in philosophy; then, becoming interested, he had drifted on into economics and sociology.  He had a strong sense of justice, and he soon became fired with a passion to redress wrong.  It was with gratitude that I hailed these signs of a new interest in life, though I little dreamed what the outcome would be.  With the enthusiasm of a boy he plunged excitedly into these new pursuits, regardless of whither they led him.

He had been used always to the laboratory, and so it was that he turned the dining room into a sociological laboratory.  Here came to dinner all sorts and conditions of men,—­scientists, politicians, bankers, merchants, professors, labor leaders, socialists, and anarchists.  He stirred them to discussion, and analyzed their thoughts of life and society.

He had met Ernest shortly prior to the “preacher’s night.”  And after the guests were gone, I learned how he had met him, passing down a street at night and stopping to listen to a man on a soap-box who was addressing a crowd of workingmen.  The man on the box was Ernest.  Not that he was a mere soap-box orator.  He stood high in the councils of the socialist party, was one of the leaders, and was the acknowledged leader in the philosophy of socialism.  But he had a certain clear way of stating the abstruse in simple language, was a born expositor and teacher, and was not above the soap-box as a means of interpreting economics to the workingmen.