Suddenly the young man, Nahum Beals, hit his knees a sounding slap, which made Ellen, furtively and timidly attentive at her window, jump.  “It seems sometimes as if the Almighty himself was in league with ’em,” he shouted out, “but I tell you it won’t last, it won’t last.”

“I don’t see much sign of any change for the better,” Andrew said, gloomily.

“I tell you, sir, it won’t last,” repeated Nahum Beals.  “I tell you, the Lord only raises ’em up higher and higher that He may dash ’em lower when the time comes.  The same earth is beneath the high places of this life, and the lowly ones, and the law that governs ’em is the same, and—­the higher the place the longer the fall, and the longer the fall the sorer the hurt.”  Nahum Beals sprang to his feet with a strange abandon of self-consciousness and a fiery impetus for one of his New England blood.  He had a delicate, nervous face, like a woman’s, his blue eyes gleamed like blue flames under his overhang of white forehead, he shook his head as if it were maned like a lion, and, though he wore his thin, fair hair short, one could seem to see it flung back in glistening lines.  He spread his hands as if he were addressing an audience, and as he did so the parlor door opened and Jim Tenny and Eva stood there, listening.

“I tell you, sir,” shouted Nahum Beals, “the time will come when you will all thank God that you belong to the poor and down-trodden of this earth, and not to the rich and great—­the time will come.  There’s knives to sharpen to-day, and wood for scaffolds as plenty as in the days of the French Revolution, and the hand that marks the time of day on the clock of men’s patience with wrong and oppression has near gone round to the same hour and minute.”

Andrew Brewster looked at him, with a curious expression half of disgust, half of sympathy.  His sense of dignity in the face of adversity inherited from his New England race was shocked; he was not one to be blindly swayed by another’s fervor even when his own wrongs were in question.  He would not have made a good follower in a revolution, nor a leader.  He would simply have found his own place of fixed principle and abided there.  Then, too, he had a judicial mind which could combine the elements of counsels for and against his own cause.

“Now, look at here,” he said, slowly, “I ain’t goin’ to say I don’t think we ain’t in a hard place, and that there’s somethin’ wrong that’s to blame for it, but I dunno but you go most too far, Nahum; or, rather, I dunno as you go far enough.  I dunno but we’ve got to dig down past the poor and the rich, farther into the everlastin’ foundations of things to get at what’s the trouble.”

Jim Tenny, standing in the parlor doorway, with an arm around Eva’s waist, broke in suddenly with a defiant laugh.  “I don’t care nothin’ about the everlastin’ foundations of things, and I don’t care a darn about the rich and the poor,” he proclaimed.  “I’m willin’ to leave that to lecturers and dynamiters, and let ’em settle it if they can.  I don’t grudge the rich nothin’, and I ain’t goin’ to call the Almighty to account for givin’ somebody else the biggest piece of pie; mebbe it would give me the stomach-ache.  All I’m concerned about is Lloyd’s shut-down.”