She stood resting both hands on a little table behind her, in an attitude touched with the wild freedom which best became her, a gleam of storm in her great eyes.

“Why are you still a Venturist?” he asked her abruptly.

“Because I have every right to be!  I joined a society, pledged to work ‘for a better future.’  According to my lights, I do what poor work I can in that spirit.”

“You are not a Socialist.  Half the things you say, or imply, show it.  And we are Socialists.”

She hesitated, looking at him steadily.

“No!—­so far as Socialism means a political system—­the trampling out of private enterprise and competition, and all the rest of it—­I find myself slipping away from it more and more.  No!—­as I go about among these wage-earners, the emphasis—­do what I will—­comes to lie less and less on possession—­more and more on character.  I go to two tenements in the same building.  One is Hell—­the other Heaven.  Why?  Both belong to well-paid artisans with equal opportunities.  Both, so far as I can see, might have a decent and pleasant life of it.  But one is a man—­the other, with all his belongings, will soon be a vagabond.  That is not all, I know—­oh! don’t trouble to tell me so!—­but it is more than I thought.  No!—­my sympathies in this district where I work are not so much with the Socialists that I know here—­saving your presence! but—­with the people, for instance, that slave at Charity Organisation! and get all the abuse from all sides.”

Anthony laughed scornfully.

“It is always the way with a woman,” he said; “she invariably prefers the tinkers to the reformers.”

“And as to your Socialism,” she went on, unheeding, the thought of many days finding defiant expression—­“it seems to me like all other interesting and important things—­destined to help something else!  Christianity begins with the poor and division of goods—­it becomes the great bulwark of property and the feudal state.  The Crusades—­they set out to recover the tomb of the Lord!—­what they did was to increase trade and knowledge.  And so with Socialism.  It talks of a new order—­what it will do is to help to make the old sound!”

Anthony clapped her ironically.

“Excellent!  When the Liberty and Property Defence people have got hold of you—­ask me to come and hear!”

Meanwhile, Louis stood behind, with his hands on his sides, a smile in his blinking eyes.  He really had a contempt for what a handsome half-taught girl of twenty-three might think.  Anthony only pretended or desired to have it.

Nevertheless, Louis said good-bye to his hostess with real, and, for him, rare effusion.  Two years before, for the space of some months, he had been in love with her.  That she had never responded with anything warmer than liking and comradeship he knew; and his Anna now possessed him wholly.  But there was a deep and gentle chivalry at the bottom of all his stern social faiths; and the woman towards whom he had once felt as he had towards Marcella Boyce could never lose the glamour lent her by that moment of passionate youth.  And now, so kindly, so eagerly!—­she had given him his Anna.