There were other people in the office, of course; men and women, busy, efficient, coming in and out, talking, working, organising.  They were kind, pleasant people.  Gerda liked them, but they were shadowy.

And behind them all, and behind Barry, there was the work.  The work was enormously interesting.  Gerda, child of her generation and of her parents, was really a democrat, really public-spirited, outside the little private cell of her withdrawn reserves.  Beauty wasn’t enough; making poetry and pictures wasn’t enough; one had to give everyone his and her chance to have beauty and poetry and pictures too.  In spite of having been brought up in this creed, Gerda and Kay held to it, had not reacted from it to a selfish aristocracy, as you might think likely.  Their democracy went much further than that of their parents.  They had been used ardently to call themselves Bolshevists until such time as it was forced upon them that Bolshevism was not, in point of fact, a democratic system.  They and some of their friends still occasionally used that label, in moments rather of after-dinner enthusiasm than of the precise thinking that is done in morning light.  For, after all, even Mr. Bertrand Russell, even Mrs. Philip Snowden, might be wrong in their hurried jottings down of the results of a cursory survey of so intricate a system.  And, anyhow, Bolshevism had the advantage that it had not yet been tried in this country, and no one, not even the most imaginative and clear-sighted political theorist, could forecast the precise form into which the curious British climate might mould it if it should ever adopt it.  So that to believe in it was, anyhow, easier than believing in anything which had been tried (and, like all things which are tried, found wanting) such as Liberalism, Toryism, Socialism, and so forth.

But the W.E.A. was a practical body, which went in for practical adventure.  Dowdy, schoolmarmish, extension-lectureish, it might be and doubtless was.  But a real thing, with guts in it, really doing something; and after all, you can’t be incendiarising the political and economic constitution all your time.  In your times off you can do something useful, something which shows results, and for which such an enormous amount of faith and hope is not required.  Work for the Revolution—­yes, of course, one did that; one studied the literature of the Internationals; one talked....  But did one help the Revolution on much, when all was said?  Whereas in the W.E.A. office one really got things done; one typed a letter and something happened because of it; more adult classes occurred, more workers got educated.  Gerda, too young and too serious to be cynical, believed that this must be right and good.

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