“Not since I graduated from newspaper work in Boston.  That’s a good many years ago.  By the way, our old landlady died this year.”

“Do you mean—?” “Granite Face,” I was about to say.  I had forgotten her name, but that homesick scene when Tom and I stood before our open trunks, when Krebs had paid us a visit, came back to me.  “You’ve kept in touch with her?” I asked, in surprise.

“Well,” said Krebs, “she was one of the few friends I had at Cambridge.  I had a letter from the daughter last week.  She’s done very well, and is an instructor in biology in one of the western universities.”

I was silent a moment.

“And you,—­you never married, did you?” I inquired, somewhat irrelevantly.

His semi-humorous gesture seemed to deny that such a luxury was for him.  The conversation dragged a little; I began to feel the curiosity he invariably inspired.  What was his life?  What were his beliefs?  And I was possessed by a certain militancy, a desire to “smoke him out.”  I did not stop to reflect that mine was in reality a defensive rather than an aggressive attitude.

“Do you live down here, in this part of the city?” I asked.

No, he boarded in Fowler Street.  I knew it as in a district given over to the small houses of working-men.

“I suppose you are still a socialist.”

“I suppose I am,” he admitted, and added, “at any rate, that is as near as you can get to it.”

“Isn’t it fairly definite?”

“Fairly, if my notions are taken in general as the antithesis of what you fellows believe.”

“The abolition of property, for instance.”

“The abolition of too much property.”

“What do you mean by ’too much’?”

“When it ceases to be real to a man, when it represents more than his need, when it drives him and he becomes a slave to it.”

Involuntarily I thought of my new house,—­not a soothing reflection.

“But who is going to decree how much property, a man should have?”

“Nobody—­everybody.  That will gradually tend to work itself out as we become more sensible and better educated, and understand more clearly what is good for us.”

I retorted with the stock, common-sense phrase.

“If we had a division to-morrow, within a few years or so the most efficient would contrive to get the bulk of it back in their hands.”

“That’s so,” he admitted.  “But we’re not going to have a division to-morrow.”

“Thank God!” I exclaimed.

He regarded me.

“The ‘efficient’ will have to die or be educated first.  That will take time.”

“Educated!”

“Paret, have you ever read any serious books on what you call socialism?” he asked.

I threw out an impatient negative.  I was going on to protest that I was not ignorant of the doctrine.

“Oh, what you call socialism is merely what you believe to be the more or less crude and utopian propaganda of an obscure political party.  That isn’t socialism.  Nor is the anomalistic attempt that the Christian Socialists make to unite modern socialistic philosophy with Christian orthodoxy, socialism.”