Das ist der Kampf, den allnaechtlich
    Bevor das Dunkel zerrinnt,
    Einsam und gramvoll auskaempt
    Des Jahrhunderts verlorenes Kind.

Yetta waved her long and beautifully shaped hands—­they were her solitary vanity.  The audience became still.  She addressed them at first in deliberate tones, and Arthur noted that the interest was genuine—­he wondered how long his fat-witted club friends could endure or appreciate the easy manner in which Yetta Silverman quoted from great thinkers, and sprinkled these quotations with her own biting observations.

“Richard Wagner—­who loved humanity when he wrote Siegfried and regretted that love in Parsifal!

“Richard Wagner—­who loved ice-cream more than Dresden’s freedom—­Wagner:  the Swiss family bell-ringer of ’48!

“To Max Stirner, Ibsen, and Richard Strauss belongs the twentieth century!

“Nietzsche—­the anarch of aristocrats!

“Karl Marx—­or the selfish Jew socialist!

“Lassalle—­the Jew comedian of liberty!

“Bernard Shaw—­the clever Celt who would sacrifice socialism for an epigram.

“Curse all socialists!” she suddenly screamed.

Arthur, entranced by the playful manner with which she disposed of friend and foe, was aghast at this outbreak.  He saw another Yetta.  Her face was ugly and revengeful.  She sawed the air with her thin arms.

“Repeat after me,” she adjured her hearers, “the Catechism of Sergei Netschajew, but begin with Herzen’s noble motto:  ’Long live chaos and destruction!’”

“Long live chaos and destruction!” was heartily roared.

The terrific catechism of the apostle Netschajew made Arthur shake with alternate woe and wrath.  It was bloody-minded beyond description.  Like a diabolic litany boomed the questions and answers:—­

“Day and night we must have but one thought—­inexorable destruction.”  And Arthur recalled how this pupil of Bakounine had with the assistance of Pryow and Nicolajew beguiled a certain suspected friend, Ivanow, into a lonely garden and killed him, throwing the body into a lake.  After that Netschajew disappeared, though occasionally showing himself in Switzerland and England.  Finally, in 1872, he was nabbed by the Russian government, sent to Siberia, and—!

Ugh! thought Arthur, what a people, what an ending!  And Yetta—­why did she now so openly proclaim destruction as the only palliative for social crime when she had so eloquently disclaimed earlier in the day the propaganda by force, by dagger, and dynamite?—­He had hardly asked himself the question when there came a fierce rapping of wooden clubs at door and window.  Instantly a brooding hush like that which precedes a hurricane fell upon the gathering.  But Yetta did not long remain silent.