The plan had appealed to his cynical soul from the first.  It was the apotheosis of cynicism, this reducing of a world to its lowest level.  And it had amused him to see his wife, a gentlewoman born, bewildered before the chaos he depicted.

“But—­it is German!” she had said.

“I bow before intelligence.  It is German.  Also it is Russian.  Also it is of all nations.  All this talk now, of a League of Nations, a few dull diplomats acting as God over the peoples of the earth!” His eyes blazed.  “While the true league, of the workers of the world, is already in effect!”

But he watched her after that, not that he was afraid of her, but because her re-action as a woman was important.  He feared women in the movement.  It had its disciples, fervent and eloquent, paid and unpaid women agitators, but he did not trust them.  They were invariably women without home ties, women with nothing to protect, women with everything to gain and nothing to lose.  The woman in the home was a natural anti-radical.  Not the police, not even the army, but the woman in the home was the deadly enemy of the great plan.

He began to hate Elinor, not so much for herself, as for the women she represented.  She became the embodiment of possible failure.  She stood in his path, passively resistant, stubbornly brave.

She was not a clever woman, and she was slow in gathering the full significance of a nation-wide general strike, that with an end of all production the non-producing world would be beaten to its knees.  And then she waited for a world movement, forgetting that a flame must start somewhere and then spread.  But she listened and learned.  There was a great deal of talk about class and mass.  She learned that the mass, for instance, was hungry for a change.  It would welcome any change.  Woslosky had been in Russia when the Kerensky regime was overthrown, and had seen that strange three days when the submerged part of the city filled the streets, singing, smiling, endlessly walking, exalted and without guile.

No problems troubled them.  They had ceased to labor, and that was enough.

Had it not been for its leaders, the mass would have risen like a tide, and ebbed again.

Elinor had struggled to understand.  This was not Socialism.  Jim had been a Socialist for years.  He had believed that the gradual elevation of the few, the gradual subjection of the many, would go on until the majority would drag the few down to their own level.  But this new dream was something immediate.  At her table she began to hear talk of substituting for that slow process a militant minority.  She was a long time, months, in discovering that Jim Doyle was one of the leaders of that militant minority, and that the methods of it were unspeakably criminal.

Then had begun Elinor Doyle’s long battle, at first to hold him back, and that failing, the fight between her duty to her husband and that to her country.  He had been her one occupation and obsession too long to be easily abandoned, but she was sturdily national, too.  In the end she made her decision.  She lived in his house, mended his clothing, served his food, met his accomplices, and—­watched.