‘She, of course, is strongly of the same opinion?’

‘Adela is a Socialist.’

Mrs. Boscobel laughed rather satirically.

‘I doubt it.’

Stella, when she went to sit with Adela, either at home or by the sea-shore, often carried a book in her hand, and at Adela’s request she read aloud.  In this way Adela first came to know what was meant by literature, as distinguished from works of learning.  The verse of Shelley and the prose of Landor fell upon her ears; it was as though she had hitherto lived in deafness.  Sometimes she had to beg the reader to pause for that day; her heart and mind seemed overfull; she could not even speak of these new things, but felt the need of lying back in twilight to marvel and repeat melodies.

Mrs. Boscobel happened to approach them once whilst this reading was going on.

‘You are educating her?’ she said to Stella afterwards.

‘Perhaps—­a little,’ Stella replied absently.

‘Isn’t it just a trifle dangerous?’ suggested the understanding lady.

‘Dangerous?  How?’

’The wife of the man who makes sparks fly out of iron?  The man who is on no account to learn anything?’

Stella shook her head, saying, ‘You don’t know her.’

‘I should much like to,’ was Mrs. Boscobel’s smiling rejoinder.

In Stella’s company it did not seem very likely that Adela would lose her social enthusiasm, yet danger there was, and that precisely on account of Mrs. Westlake’s idealist tendencies.  When she spoke of the toiling multitude, she saw them in a kind of exalted vision; she beheld them glorious in their woe, ennobled by the tyranny under which they groaned.  She had seen little if anything of the representative proletarian, and perchance even if she had the momentary impression would have faded in the light of her burning soul.  Now Adela was in the very best position for understanding those faults of the working class which are ineradicable in any one generation.  She knew her husband, knew him better than ever now that she regarded him from a distance; she knew ’Arry Mutimer; and now she was getting to appreciate with a thoroughness impossible hitherto, the monstrous gulf between men of that kind and cultured human beings.  She had, too, studied the children and the women of New Wanley, and the results of such study were arranging themselves in her mind.  All unconsciously, Stella Westlake was cooling Adela’s zeal with every fervid word she uttered; Adela at times with difficulty restrained herself from crying, ’But it is a mistake!  They have not these feelings you attribute to them.  Such suffering as you picture them enduring comes only of the poetry-fed soul at issue with fate.’  She could not as yet have so expressed herself, but the knowledge was growing within her.  For Adela was not by nature a social enthusiast.  When her heart leapt at Stella’s chant, it was not in truth through contagion of sympathy, but in admiration