It was a great crowd, a good many thousands altogether, men and women and children and lads.  It was dressed in its Sunday best, in attire which fluctuated from bright tints of glaring newness to the dullness of well-brushed and obtrusive shabbiness.  There were every-looking men you could think of and women and girls, young and old, pretty and plain and repulsive.  But it was a working-people crowd.  There was no room among it for the idlers.  Probably it was not fashionable for them to be there.

And there was this about the crowd, which impressed Ned, everybody seemed dissatisfied, everybody was seeking for a new idea, for something fresh.  There was no confidence in the Old, no content with what existed, no common faith in what was to come.  There was on many a face the same misery that he had seen in Paddy’s Market.  There was no happiness, no face free from care, excepting where lovers passed arm-in-arm.  There was the clash of ideas, the struggling of opinions, the blind leading the blind.  He saw the socialistic orator contending with a dozen others.  Who were the nostrum vendors?  Which was the truth?

He turned round, agitated in thought, and his glance fell on Geisner, who was standing with bent head, his hands behind him, ugly, impassive.  Geisner looked up quickly:  “So you are doubting already,” he remarked.

“I am not doubting,” answered Ned.  “I’m only thinking.”

“Well?”

“It is a good thought, that Socialism,” answered Ned slowly, as they walked on.  “There’s nothing in it that doesn’t seem fit for men to do.  It’s a part with Nellie kissing that woman in the wet.  What tries to make us care for each other and prevent harm being done to one another can’t be very far wrong and what tries to break down the state of affairs that is must be a little right.  I don’t care, either, whether it’s right or wrong.  It feels right in my heart somehow and I’ll stand by it if I’m the only man left in the world to talk up for it.”

Geisner linked his arm in Ned’s.

“Remember this when you are sorrowful,” he said.  “It is only through Pain that Good comes.  It is only because the world suffers that Socialism is possible.  It is only as we conquer our own weaknesses that we can serve the Cause.”

They strolled on till they came to the terraced steps of the Gardens.  Before them stretched in all its wondrous glory the matchless panorama of grove and garden, hill-closed sea and villa’d shore, the blue sky and the declining sun tipping with gold and silver the dark masses of an inland cloud.

“What is Life that we should covet it?” said Geisner, halting there.  “What is Death that we should fear it so?  What has the world to offer that we should swerve to the right hand or the left from the path our innermost soul approves?  In the whole world, there is no lovelier spot than this, no purer joy than to stand here and look.  Yet, it seems to me, Paradise like this would be bought dearly by one single thought unworthy of oneself.”