children’s blood.  From now on there can be no compromise, no truce, no peace until they are exterminated.  It is war.”  War!  In Janet’s soul the word resounded like a tocsin.  And again, as when swept along East Street with the mob, that sense of identity with these people and their wrongs, of submergence with them in their cause possessed her.  Despite her ancestry, her lot was cast with them.  She, too, had been precariously close to poverty, had known the sordidness of life; she, too, and Lise and Hannah had been duped and cheated of the fairer things.  Eagerly she had drunk in the vocabulary of that new and terrible philosophy.  The master class must be exterminated!  Was it not true, if she had been of that class, that Ditmar would not have dared to use and deceive her?  Why had she never thought of these things before?...  The light was beginning to fade, the great meeting was breaking up, and yet she lingered.  At the foot of the bandstand steps, conversing with a small group of operatives that surrounded him, she perceived the man who had just spoken.  And as she stood hesitating, gazing at him, a desire to hear more, to hear all of this creed he preached, that fed the fires in her soul, urged her forward.  Her need, had she known it, was even greater than that of these toilers whom she now called comrades.  Despite some qualifying reserve she felt, and which had had to do with the redness of his lips, he attracted her.  He had a mind, an intellect, he must possess stores of the knowledge for which she thirsted; he appeared to her as one who had studied and travelled, who had ascended heights and gained the wider view denied her.  A cynical cosmopolitanism would have left her cold, but here, apparently, was a cultivated man burning with a sense of the world’s wrongs.  Ditmar, who was to have led her out of captivity, had only thrust her the deeper into bondage....  She joined the group, halting on the edge of it, listening.  Rolfe was arguing with a man about the labour unions, but almost at once she knew she had fixed his attention.  From time to time, as he talked, his eyes sought hers boldly, and in their dark pupils were tiny points of light that stirred and confused her, made her wonder what was behind them, in his soul.  When he had finished his argument, he singled her out.

“You do not work in the mills?” he asked.

“No, I’m a stenographer—­or I was one.”

“And now?”

“I’ve given up my place.”

“You want to join us?”

“I was interested in what you said.  I never heard anything like it before.”

He looked at her intently.

“Come, let us walk a little way,” he said.  And she went along by his side, through the Common, feeling a neophyte’s excitement in the freemasonry, the contempt for petty conventions of this newly achieved doctrine of brotherhood.  “I will give you things to read, you shall be one of us.”

“I’m afraid I shouldn’t understand them,” Janet replied.  “I’ve read so little.”