“And this?” she said, moving restlessly towards his table, and taking up the photograph of Edward Hallin.

“Ah! that is the greatest friend I have in the world.  But I am sure you know the name.  Mr. Hallin—­Edward Hallin.”

She paused bewildered.

“What! the Mr. Hallin—­that was Edward Hallin—­who settled the Nottingham strike last month—­who lectures so much in the East End, and in the north?”

“The same.  We are old college friends.  I owe him much, and in all his excitements he does not forget old friends.  There, you see—­” and he opened a blotting book and pointed smiling to some closely written sheets lying within it—­“is my last letter to him.  I often write two of those in the week, and he to me.  We don’t agree on a number of things, but that doesn’t matter.”

“What can you find to write about?” she said wondering.  “I thought nobody wrote letters nowadays, only notes.  Is it books, or people?”

“Both, when it pleases us!” How soon, oh! ye favouring gods, might he reveal to her the part she herself played in those closely covered sheets?  “But he writes to me on social matters chiefly.  His whole heart, as you probably know, is in certain experiments and reforms in which he sometimes asks me to help him.”

Marcella opened her eyes.  These were new lights.  She began to recall all that she had heard of young Hallin’s position in the Labour movement; his personal magnetism and prestige; his power as a speaker.  Her Socialist friends, she remembered, thought him in the way—­a force, but a dangerous one.  He was for the follies of compromise—­could not be got to disavow the principle of private property, while ready to go great lengths in certain directions towards collective action and corporate control.  The “stalwarts” of her sect would have none of him as a leader, while admitting his charm as a human being—­a charm she remembered to have heard discussed with some anxiety among her Venturist friends.  But for ordinary people he went far enough.  Her father, she remembered, had dubbed him an “Anarchist” in connection with the terms he had been able to secure for the Nottingham strikers, as reported in the newspapers.  It astonished her to come across the man again as Mr. Raeburn’s friend.

They talked about Hallin a little, and about Aldous’s Cambridge acquaintance with him.  Then Marcella, still nervous, went to look at the bookshelves, and found herself in front of that working collection of books on economics which Aldous kept in his own room under his hand, by way of guide to the very fine special collection he was gradually making in the library downstairs.