“Ay!” “Ay!” from forty voices.  Maria, pale and trembling, watched McCall.

“Free speech is our boast,” piped the widow.  “If not ours, whose?”

“Before you go any farther,” said the Muse with studied politeness, “I have a question to put to Herr Bluhm.  Did you did you not, sir, in Toombs’s drug-store last week, denominate this club a caravan of idiots?” A breathless silence fell upon the assembly.  Bluhm gasped inarticulately.  “His face condemns him,” pursued his accuser.  “Shall such a man be allowed to speak among us?  Ay, to take the lead among us?”

Cries of “No!” “No!”

“What becomes of your free speech?” cried Bluhm, red and stammering with fury.  “I was angry.  I am rough, perhaps, but I seek the truth, as those do not who”—­advancing and shaking his shut hand at the Muse—­“who ‘smile and smile, and are a villain still.’”

“The order of the day”—­the widow’s voice rose above the din tranquilly—­“is Shall marriage in the Consolidated Republic be contracted for life or for a term of years?”

The next moment Maria felt her arm grasped.  “Come out of this,” whispered McCall, angry and excited.  “This is no place for you, Maria.  Did you hear what they are going to discuss?”

“Yes,” as he whisked her out of the door.

“Then I’m sorry for it.  Such things oughtn’t to be mentioned in a lady’s presence.  If I had a sister, she should not know there was such a thing as bigamy.  Good God!” wiping his forehead with his handkerchief, “if women are not pure and spotless, what have we to look up to?  And these shallow girls, who propose to reform the world, begin by dabbling with the filth of the gutter, if they do no worse?”

“Shallow girls?” He was so big and angry that she felt like a wren or sparrow in his hold.  But the stupidity of him! the blind idiocy!  She eyed him from head to foot with a bitterness and contempt unutterable—­a handsome six-foot animal, with his small brain filled with smaller, worn-out prejudices!  The way of escape had been set before him, and he had spurned it—­and her!

“I don’t see what it can matter to you,” she said politely, disengaging herself, “whether I make friends with these people and am stained with the filth of the gutter or not?” She had a half-insane consciousness that she was playing her last card.

“Why, to be sure it matters.  You and I have been good friends always, Maria, and I don’t like to see you fellowship with that lot.  What was it Bluhm called them?” laughing.  “That was rough in Bluhm—­rough.  They’re women.”

“You are going?”

“In the next train, yes, I waited to see a—­a friend, but he did not come.  It’s just as well, perhaps,” his face saddened.  “Well, good-bye, Maria.  Don’t be offended at me for not approving of your friends.  Why, bless my soul! such talk is—­it’s not decent;” and with a careless shake of the hand he was gone.

Maria told herself that she despised a man who could so dismiss the great social problem and its prophets with a fillip of his thumb.  She turned to go in to the assemblage of prophets.  They were all that was left her in life.  But she did not go in.  She went to her bare chamber, and took Hero up on her lap and cried over him. “You love me, doggy?” she said.