Her living room was a material projection of Yetta Silverman’s soul.  The apartment on the north side of Tompkins Square, was small, sunny, and comfortable.  From its windows in spring and summer she could see the boys and girls playing around the big, bare park, and when her eyes grew tired of the street she rested them on her beloved books and pictures.  On one wall hung the portraits of Herzen, Bakounine and Kropotkin—­the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of the anarchistic movement, as she piously called them.  Other images of the propaganda were scattered over the walls:  Netschajew—­the St. Paul of the Nihilists—­Ravachol, Octave Mirbeau, Jean Grave, Reclus, Spies, Parsons, Engels, and Lingg—­the last four victims of the Haymarket affair, and the Fenians, Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien, the Manchester martyrs.  Among the philosophers, poets, and artists were Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Max Stirner—­a rare drawing—­Ibsen, Thoreau, Emerson—­the great American individualists—­Beethoven, Zola, Richard Strauss, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Gorky, Walt Whitman, Dostoiewsky, Mazzini, Rodin, Constantin Meunier, Shelley, Turgenieff, Bernard Shaw, and finally the kindly face and intellectual head of the lawyer who so zealously defended the Chicago anarchists.  This diversified group, together with much revolutionary literature, poems, pamphlets, the works of Proudhon, Songs Before Sunrise, by Swinburne, and a beautiful etching of Makart’s proletarian Christ, completed, with an old square pianoforte, the ensemble of an individual room, a room that expressed, as her admirers said, the strong, suffering soul of Yetta Silverman, Russian anarchist, agitator, and exile.

“Come in,” she cried out in her sharp, though not unpleasant, voice.  A thin young man entered.  She clapped her hands.

“Oh, so you changed your mind!” He looked at her over his glasses with his weak, blue eyes, the white of which predominated.  Simply dressed, he nevertheless gave the impression of superior social station.  He was of the New England theological-seminary type—­narrow-chested, gaunt as to visage, by temperament drawn to theology, or, in default of religious belief, an ardent enthusiast in sociology.  The contracted temples, uncertain gaze, and absence of fulness beneath the eyes betrayed the unimaginative man.  Art was a sealed book to him, though taxation fairly fired his suspicious soul.  He was nervous because he was dyspeptic, and at one time of his career he mistook stomach trouble for a call to the pulpit.  And he was a millionnaire more times than he took the trouble to count.

“Yes,” he timidly replied, “I did change my wavering mind—­as you call that deficient organ of mine—­and so I returned.  I hope I don’t disturb you!”