“Indignant—­that so many people were suffering.”

His question threw her into reflection.

“Why, no,” she answered, at length, “I never thought——­I see what you mean.  Four or five years ago, when I was going to socialist lectures, my sense of all this—­inequality, injustice was intellectual.  I didn’t get indignant over it, as I do now when I think of it.”

“And why do you get indignant now?”

“You mean,” she asked, “that I have no right to be indignant, since I do nothing to attempt to better conditions?—­”

“Not at all,” Hodder disavowed.  “Perhaps my question is too personal, but I didn’t intend it to be.  I was merely wondering whether any event or series of events had transformed a mere knowledge of these conditions into feeling.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, but not in offence.  Once more she relapsed into thought.  And as he watched her, in silence, the colour that flowed and ebbed in her cheeks registered the coming and going of memories; of incidents in her life hidden from him, arousing in the man the torture of jealousy.  But his faculties, keenly alert, grasped the entire field; marked once more the empirical trait in her that he loved her unflinching willingness to submit herself to an experiment.

“I suppose so,” she replied at length, her thoughts naturally assuming speech.  “Yes, I can see that it is so.  Yet my experience has not been with these conditions with which Mr. Bentley, with which you have been brought in contact, but with the other side—­with luxury.  Oh, I am sick of luxury!  I love it, I am not at all sure that I could do without it, but I hate it, too, I rebel against it.  You can’t understand that.”

“I think I can,” he answered her.

“When I see the creatures it makes,” she cried, “I hate it.  My profession has brought me in such close contact with it that I rebelled at last, and came out here very suddenly, just to get away from it in the mass.  To renew my youth, if I could.  The gardens were only an excuse.  I had come to a point where I wanted to be quiet, to be alone, to think, and I knew my father would be going away.  So much of my girlhood was spent in that Park that I know every corner of it, and I—­obeyed the impulse.  I wanted to test it.”

“Yes,” he said, absorbed.

“I might have gone to the mountains or the sea, but some one would have come and found me, and I should have been bound again—­on the wheel.  I shouldn’t have had the strength to resist.  But here—­have you ever felt,” she demanded, “that you craved a particular locality at a certain time?”

He followed her still.

“That is how I felt.  These associations, that Park, the thought of my girlhood, of my mother, who understood me as no one else has since, assumed a certain value.  New York became unbearable.  It is just there, in the very centre of our modern civilization, that one sees the crudest passions.  Oh, I have often wondered whether a man, however disillusioned, could see New York as a woman sees it when the glamour is gone.  We are the natural prey of the conqueror still.  We dream of independence—­”