He turned and walked beside her.  “I have been to take home Miss Denah,” he explained.  “I saw you a long way off, and thought perhaps I might escort you; but you are angry; I am sorry.”

Julia could not forbear smiling at him.  “I am not angry,” she said, as she would to a child; “I was only thinking.”

“Of something unpleasant, then, that makes you angry?”

“No; of something that must have been enjoyable.  I was thinking how, in the French Revolution, the women of the people must have enjoyed throwing mud at the women of the aristocrats; how they must have liked scratching the paint and the skin from their faces, and tearing their hair down, and their clothes off.”

Joost stared in amazement.  “Do you call that not unpleasant?” he said.  “It is the most grievous, the most pitiable thing in all the world.”

“For the aristocrats, yes,” Julia agreed; “but for the others?  Can you not imagine how they must have revelled in it?”

Joost could not; he could not imagine anything violent or terrible, and Julia went on to ask him another question, which, however, she answered herself.

“Do you know why the women of the people did it?  It was not only because the others had food and they had not; I think it was more because the aristocrats had a thousand other things that they had not, and could never have—­feelings, instincts, pleasures, traditions—­which they could not have had or enjoyed even if they had been put in palaces and dressed like queens.  It was the fact that they could never, never rise to them, that helped to make them so furious to pull all down.”

There was a sincerity of conviction in her tone, but Joost only said, “You cannot enjoy to think of such things; it is horrible and pitiable to remember that human creatures became so like beasts.”

Julia’s mood altered.  “Pitiable, yes; perhaps you are right.  After all, we are pitiful creatures, and, under the thin veneer, like enough to the beasts.”  Then she changed the subject abruptly, and began to talk of his flowers.

But he was not satisfied with the change; instinctively he felt she was talking to his level.  “Why do you always speak to me of bulbs and plants?” he said.  “Do you think I am interested in nothing else?”

“No,” she said; “I speak of them because I am interested.  Do you not believe me?  It is quite true; you yourself have said that I should make a good florist; already I have learnt a great deal, although I have not been here long, and knew nothing before I came.”

“That is so,” he admitted; “you are very clever.  Nevertheless, I do not think, if you were alone now, you would be thinking of plants.  You were not when I met you; it was the Revolution, or, perhaps, human nature—­you called it the Revolution in a parable, as you often do when you speak your thoughts.”

“Why do you trouble about my thoughts?” Julia said, impatiently.  “How do you know what I think?”