“No, not yet.  I am sitting with my hands folded in my lap, like the women of your class—­ladies, you call them.”  She accented the title, without bitterness.  A cursory estimate of her appearance would have placed her in the profession of a trained nurse, or perhaps in the remotest analysis, a sewing woman of superior tastes.  She was small, wiry, her head too large for her body; but the abounding nervous vitality, the harsh fire that burned in her large brown eyes, and the firm mouth would have attracted the attention of the most careless.  Her mask, with its high Slavic cheek-bones and sharp Jewish nose, proclaimed her a magnetic woman.  In her quarter on the far East Side the children called her “Aunt Yetta.”  She was a sister of charity in the guise of a revolutionist.

“You sit but you think, and my ladies never think,” he answered, in his boyish voice.  He seemed proud to be so near this distinguished creature.  Had she not been sent to Siberia, driven out of France and Germany, and arrested in New York for her incendiary speeches?  She possessed the most extraordinary power over an audience.  Once, at Cooper Union, Arthur had seen her control a crazy mob bent on destroying the building because a few stupid police had interfered with the meeting.  Among her brethren Yetta Silverman was classed with Louise Michel, Sophia Perowskaia, and Vera Zassoulitch, those valiant women, true guardian angels, veritable martyrs to the cause.  He thought of them as he watched the delicate-looking young woman before him.

Arthur was too chilly of blood to fall in love with her; his admiration was purely cerebral.  He was unlucky enough to have had for a father a shrewd, visionary man, that curious combination of merchant and dreamer once to be found in New England.  A follower of Fourier, a friend of Emerson, the elder Wyartz had gone to Brook Farm and had left it in a few months.  Dollars, not dreams, was his true ambition.  But he registered his dissatisfaction with this futile attempt by christening his only son, Arthur Schopenhauer; it was old Wyartz’s way of getting even with the ideal.  Obsessed from the age of spelling by his pessimistic middle name, the boy had grown up in a cloudy compromise of rebellion and the church.  For a few years he vacillated; he went to Harvard, studied the Higher Criticism, made a trip abroad, wrote a little book recording the contending impulses of his pale, harassed soul—­Oscillations was the title—­and returned to Boston a mild anarch.  Emerson the mystic, transposed to the key of France, sometimes makes bizarre music.

She arose and, walking over to him, put her hand nonchalantly on his shoulder.

“Arthur, comrade, what do you mean to do with yourself—­come, what will all this enthusiasm bring forth?” He fumbled his glasses with his thumb and index finger—­a characteristic gesture—­and nervously regarded her before answering.  Then he smiled at his idea.