She shivered, but was silent.

“Is it not so?” he repeated.  “They have wronged you, too, perhaps,—­they have wronged us all, but some are too stupid, too cowardly to fight and crush them.  Christians and slaves submit.  The old religion teaches that the world is cruel for most of us, but if we are obedient and humble we shall be rewarded in heaven.”  Rolfe laughed.  “The masters approve of that teaching.  They would not have it changed.  But for us it is war.  We’ll strike and keep on striking, we’ll break their machinery, spoil their mills and factories, and drive them out.  And even if we do not win at once, it is better to suffer and die fighting than to have the life ground out of us—­is it not?”

“Yes, it is better!” she agreed.  The passion in her voice did not escape him.

“Some day, perhaps sooner than we think, we shall have the true Armageddon, the general strike, when the last sleeping toiler shall have aroused himself from his lethargy to rise up and come into his inheritance.”  He seemed to detach himself from her, his eyes became more luminous.

“`Like unseen music in the night,’—­so Sorel writes about it.  They may scoff at it, the wise ones, but it will come. `Like music in the night!’ You respond to that!”

Again she was silent.  They had walked on, through familiar streets that now seemed strange.

“You respond—­I can tell,” he said.  “And yet, you are not like these others, like me, even.  You are an American.  And yet you are not like most of your countrywomen.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I will tell you.  Because they are cold, most of them, and trivial, they do not feel.  But you—­you can feel, you can love and hate.  You look calm and cold, but you are not—­I knew it when I looked at you, when you came up to me.”

She did not know whether to resent or welcome his clairvoyance, his assumption of intimacy, his air of appropriation.  But her curiosity was tingling.

“And you?” she asked.  “Your name is Rolfe, isn’t it?”

He assented.  “And yours?”

She told him.

“You have been in America long—­your family?”

“Very long,” she said.  “But you speak Italian, and Rolfe isn’t an Italian name.”

“My father was an Englishman, an artist, who lived in Italy—­my mother a peasant woman from Lombardy, such as these who come to work in the mills.  When she was young she was beautiful—­like a Madonna by an old master.”

“An old master?”

“The old masters are the great painters who lived in Italy four hundred years ago.  I was named after one of them—­the greatest.  I am called Leonard.  He was Leonardo da Vinci.”