“Pardieu, Milady!” swore Cigarette recklessly, seeking only to hold her own against the new sense of inferiority and of inability that oppressed her.  “I was in the hospital when your fruits and your wines came; and as for your people, I don’t speak of them,—­they are all slaves, they say, in Albion, and will bear to be yoked like oxen if they think they can turn any gold in the furrows—­I speak of the people.  Of the toiling, weary, agonized, joyless, hapless multitudes who labor on, and on, and on, ever in darkness, that such as you may bask in sunlight and take your pleasures wrung out of the death-sweat of millions of work-murdered poor!  What right have you to have your path strewn with roses, and every pain spared from you; only to lift your voice and say, ’Let that be done,’ to see it done?—­to find life one long, sweet summer day of gladness and abundance, while they die out in agony by thousands, ague-stricken, famine-stricken, crime-stricken, age-stricken, for want only of one ray of the light of happiness that falls from dawn to dawn like gold upon your head?”

Vehement and exaggerated as the upbraiding was, her hearer’s face grew very grave, very thoughtful, as she spoke, those luminous, earnest eyes, whose power even the young democrat felt, gazed wearily down into hers.

“Ah, child!  Do you think we never think of that?  You wrong me—­you wrong my Order.  There are many besides myself who turn over that terrible problem as despairingly as you can ever do.  As far as in us lies, we strive to remedy its evil; the uttermost effort can do but little, but that little is only lessened—­fearfully lessened—­whenever Class is arrayed against Class by that blind antagonism which animates yourself.”

Cigarette’s intelligence was too rapid not to grasp the truths conveyed by these words; but she was in no mood to acknowledge them.

“Nom de Dieu, Milady!” she swore in her teeth.  “If you do turn over the problem—­you aristocrats—­it is pretty work, no doubt!  Just putting the bits of a puzzle-ball together so long as the game pleases you, and leaving the puzzle in chaos when you are tired!  Oh, ha!  I know how fine ladies and fine gentlemen play at philanthropies!  But I am a child of the People, mark you; and I only see how birth is an angel that gives such as you eternal sunlight and eternal summer, and how birth is a devil that drives down the millions into a pit of darkness, of crime, of ignorance, of misery, of suffering, where they are condemned before they have opened their eyes to existence, where they are sentenced before they have left their mothers’ bosoms in infancy.  You do not know what that darkness is.  It is night—­it is ice—­it is hell!”

Venetia Corona sighed wearily as she heard; pain had been so far from her own life, and there was an intense eloquence in the low, deep words that seemed to thrill through the stillness.