“We might marry and fight the great fight together like the Jenkins crowd.”

“Marry!” she exclaimed—­her guttural Russian accent manifested itself when she became excited—­“marry!  You are only a baby, Arthur Schopenhauer Wyartz—­Herrgott, this child bears such a name!—­and while I am sure the thin Yankee blood of the Jenkins family needed a Jewish wife, and a Slav, I am not that way of thinking for myself.  I am married to the revolution.”  Her eyes dwelt with reverence on her new Christian saints, those Christs of the gutter, who had sacrificed their lives in the modern arena for the idea of liberty, who were thrown to the wild beasts and slaughtered by the latter-day pagans of wealth, and barbarians in purple.  He followed her glance.  It lashed him to jerky enthusiasm.

“I am not joking,” he earnestly asserted, “so pardon my rashness.  Only believe in my sincerity.  I am no anarch on paper.  I am devoted to your cause and to you, Yetta, to my last heart’s blood.  Do you need my wealth?  It is yours.  You can work miracles with millions in America.  Take it all.”

“It’s not money we need, but men,” she answered darkly.  “Your millions, which came to you innocently enough, represent the misery of—­how many?  Let the multi-millionnaires give away their money to found theological colleges and libraries—­my party will have none of it.  Its men are armed by the ideas that we prefer.  I don’t blame the rich or the political tyrants—­the mob has to be educated, the unhappy proletarians, who have so long submitted to the crack of the whip that they wouldn’t know what to do with their freedom if they had it.  All mobs believe alike in filth and fire, whether antique slaves free for their day’s Saturnalia, or the Paris crowds of ’93.  Their ideas of happiness are pillage, bloodshed, drunkenness, revenge.  Every popular uprising sinks the people deeper in their misery.  Every bomb thrown discredits the cause of liberty.”

Astonished by this concession, Arthur wondered how she had ever earned her reputation as the Russian “Red Virgin,” as an unequivocal terrorist.  Thus he had heard her hailed at all the meetings which she addressed.  But she did not notice his perturbation, she was following another train.

“You Americans do not love money as much as the Europeans—­who hoard it away, who worship it on their naked knees; but you do something worse—­you love it for the sake of the sport, a cruel sport for the poor.  You go into speculation as the English go after big game.  It is a sport.  This sport involves food—­and you gamble with wheat and meat for counters, while starving men and women pay for the game.  America is yet rich enough to afford this sport, but some day it will become crowded like Europe, and then, beware!  Wasn’t it James Hinton who said that ‘Overthrowing society means an inverted pyramid getting straight’?