He arose and began, in a few well-chosen phrases that carried an undertone of faint irony, to introduce Ernest.  Colonel Van Gilbert was subtly facetious in his introduction of the social reformer and member of the working class, and the audience smiled.  It made me angry, and I glanced at Ernest.  The sight of him made me doubly angry.  He did not seem to resent the delicate slurs.  Worse than that, he did not seem to be aware of them.  There he sat, gentle, and stolid, and somnolent.  He really looked stupid.  And for a moment the thought rose in my mind, What if he were overawed by this imposing array of power and brains?  Then I smiled.  He couldn’t fool me.  But he fooled the others, just as he had fooled Miss Brentwood.  She occupied a chair right up to the front, and several times she turned her head toward one or another of her confreres and smiled her appreciation of the remarks.

Colonel Van Gilbert done, Ernest arose and began to speak.  He began in a low voice, haltingly and modestly, and with an air of evident embarrassment.  He spoke of his birth in the working class, and of the sordidness and wretchedness of his environment, where flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented.  He described his ambitions and ideals, and his conception of the paradise wherein lived the people of the upper classes.  As he said: 

“Up above me, I knew, were unselfishnesses of the spirit, clean and noble thinking, keen intellectual living.  I knew all this because I read ’Seaside Library’* novels, in which, with the exception of the villains and adventuresses, all men and women thought beautiful thoughts, spoke a beautiful tongue, and performed glorious deeds.  In short, as I accepted the rising of the sun, I accepted that up above me was all that was fine and noble and gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life, all that made life worth living and that remunerated one for his travail and misery.”

     * A curious and amazing literature that served to make the
     working class utterly misapprehend the nature of the leisure
     class.

He went on and traced his life in the mills, the learning of the horseshoeing trade, and his meeting with the socialists.  Among them, he said, he had found keen intellects and brilliant wits, ministers of the Gospel who had been broken because their Christianity was too wide for any congregation of mammon-worshippers, and professors who had been broken on the wheel of university subservience to the ruling class.  The socialists were revolutionists, he said, struggling to overthrow the irrational society of the present and out of the material to build the rational society of the future.  Much more he said that would take too long to write, but I shall never forget how he described the life among the revolutionists.  All halting utterance vanished.  His voice grew strong and confident, and it glowed as he glowed, and as the thoughts glowed that poured out from him.  He said: