“It must be very pleasant,” said Ned, after a pause.  They had reached the higher ground and were passing under branches from which the rain-drops, collected, fell in great splashes on the umbrella.

“Yes,” said Nellie, after another pause.

“Do they go to church?” Ned began again.

“I never heard them say they did.”

“They’re not religious then?”

“What do you call religious?”

“They don’t believe anything, do they?”

“I think they believe a very great deal.  Far more than most people who pretend to believe and don’t,” answered Nellie.  There was a longer pause.  Then: 

“What do they believe?”

“In Socialism.”

“Socialism!  Look here, Nellie!  What is Socialism?”

They had passed the fig-tree avenue, turning off it by a cross path, where a stone fountain loomed up gigantic in the gloom and where they could hear a rushing torrent splashing.  They were in the region of gas-lamps again.  Nellie walked along with a swiftness that taxed Ned to keep abreast of her.  She seemed to him to take pleasure in the wet night.  In spite of their long walking of the day before and the lateness of the hour she had still the same springy step and upright carriage.  As they passed under the lamps he saw her face, damp with the rain, but flushed with exercise, her eyes gleaming, her mouth open a little.  He would have liked to have taken her hand as she steadied the umbrella, walking arm in arm with him, but he did not dare.  She was not that sort of girl.

He had felt a proud sense of proprietorship in her at the Strattons’.  It had pleased him to see how they all liked her, but pleased him most of all that she could talk as an equal with these people, to him so brilliant and clever.  The faint thought of her which had been unconsciously with him for years began to take shape.  How pleasant it would be to be like the Strattons, to live with Nellie always, and have friends to come and see them on a Saturday night!  How a man would work for a home like that, so full of music, so full of song, so full of beauty, so full of the thoughts which make men like unto gods and of the love which makes gods like unto men!  Why should not this be for him as well as for others when, as Nellie said, it really cost only what rich people thought poverty, and far less than the workingman’s share if things were fairly divided?  And why should it not be for his mates as well as for himself?  And why, most of all, why not for the wretched dwellers in the slums of Sydney, the weary women, the puny children, the imbruted men?  For the first time in his life, he coveted such things with a righteous covetousness, without hating those who had them, recognising without words that to have and to appreciate such a life was to desire ceaselessly to bring it within the reach of every human being.  He could not see how this was all to come about.  He would have followed