The name, as Rolfe pronounced it, stirred her.  And art, painting!  It was a realm unknown to her, and yet the very suggestion of it evoked yearnings.  And she recalled a picture in the window of Hartmann’s book-store, a coloured print before which she used to stop on her way to and from the office, the copy of a landscape by a California artist.  The steep hillside in the foreground was spread with the misty green of olive trees, and beyond—­far beyond—­a snow-covered peak, like some high altar, flamed red in the sunset.  She had not been able to express her feeling for this picture, it had filled her with joy and sadness.  Once she had ventured to enter and ask its price—­ten dollars.  And then came a morning when she had looked for it, and it was gone.

“And your father—­did he paint beautiful pictures, too?”

“Ah, he was too much of a socialist.  He was always away whey I was a child, and after my mother’s death he used to take me with him.  When I was seventeen we went to Milan to take part in the great strike, and there I saw the soldiers shooting down the workers by the hundreds, putting them in prison by the thousands.  Then I went to live in England, among the socialists there, and I learned the printer’s trade.  When I first came to this country I was on a labour paper in New York, I set up type, I wrote articles, and once in a while I addressed meetings on the East Side.  But even before I left London I had read a book on Syndicalism by one of the great Frenchmen, and after a while I began to realize that the proletariat would never get anywhere through socialism.”

“The proletariat?” The word was new to Janet’s ear.

“The great mass of the workers, the oppressed, the people you saw here to-day.  Socialism is not for them.  Socialism—­political socialism —­betrays them into the hands of the master class.  Direct action is the thing, the general strike, war,—­the new creed, the new religion that will bring salvation.  I joined the Industrial Workers of the World that is the American organization of Syndicalism.  I went west, to Colorado and California and Oregon, I preached to the workers wherever there was an uprising, I met the leaders, Ritter and Borkum and Antonelli and Jastro and Nellie Bond, I was useful to them, I understand Syndicalism as they do not.  And now we are here, to sow the seed in the East.  Come,” he said, slipping his arm through hers, “I will take you to Headquarters, I will enlist you, you shall be my recruit.  I will give you the cause, the religion you need.”

She longed to go, and yet she drew back, puzzled.  The man fired and fascinated her, but there were reservations, apprehensions concerning him, felt rather than reasoned.  Because of her state of rebellion, of her intense desire to satisfy in action the emotion aroused by a sense of wrong, his creed had made a violent appeal, but in his voice, in his eyes, in his manner she had been quick to detect a personal, sexual note that disturbed and alarmed her, that implied in him a lack of unity.