beer, either; it was no harm, but it was somehow unworthy, out of character with a hero of the war.  But what she really could not reconcile herself to was the violence of Lindau’s sentiments concerning the whole political and social fabric.  She did not feel sure that he should be allowed to say such things before the children, who had been nurtured in the faith of Bunker Hill and Appomattox, as the beginning and the end of all possible progress in human rights.  As a woman she was naturally an aristocrat, but as an American she was theoretically a democrat; and it astounded, it alarmed her, to hear American democracy denounced as a shuffling evasion.  She had never cared much for the United States Senate, but she doubted if she ought to sit by when it was railed at as a rich man’s club.  It shocked her to be told that the rich and poor were not equal before the law in a country where justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs, or where a poor man must go to war in his own person, and a rich man might hire someone to go in his.  Mrs. March felt that this rebellious mind in Lindau really somehow outlawed him from sympathy, and retroactively undid his past suffering for the country:  she had always particularly valued that provision of the law, because in forecasting all the possible mischances that might befall her own son, she had been comforted by the thought that if there ever was another war, and Tom were drafted, his father could buy him a substitute.  Compared with such blasphemy as this, Lindau’s declaration that there was not equality of opportunity in America, and that fully one-half the people were debarred their right to the pursuit of happiness by the hopeless conditions of their lives, was flattering praise.  She could not listen to such things in silence, though, and it did not help matters when Lindau met her arguments with facts and reasons which she felt she was merely not sufficiently instructed to combat, and he was not quite gentlemanly to urge.  “I am afraid for the effect on the children,” she said to her husband.  “Such perfectly distorted ideas—­Tom will be ruined by them.”

“Oh, let Tom find out where they’re false,” said March.  “It will be good exercise for his faculties of research.  At any rate, those things are getting said nowadays; he’ll have to hear them sooner or later.”

“Had he better hear them at home?” demanded his wife.

“Why, you know, as you’re here to refute them, Isabel,” he teased, “perhaps it’s the best place.  But don’t mind poor old Lindau, my dear.  He says himself that his parg is worse than his pidte, you know.”