“What’s this I hear about giving the girls the vote, Chris?” Johnny would innocently inquire, winking at Janet, invariably running his hand through the wiry red hair that resumed its corkscrew twist as soon as he released it.  And Chris would as invariably reply:—­“You have the dandruffs—­yes?  You come to my shop, I give you somethings....”

Sometimes the barber, in search of a more aggressive adversary than Edward, would pay visits, when as likely as not another neighbour with profound convictions and a craving for proselytes would swoop down on the defenceless Bumpuses:  Joe Shivers, for instance, who lived in one of the tenements above the cleaning and dyeing establishment kept by the Pappas Bros., and known as “The Gentleman.”  In the daytime Mr. Shivers was a model of acquiescence in a system he would have designated as one of industrial feudalism, his duty being to examine the rolls of cloth as they came from the looms of the Arundel Mill, in case of imperfections handing them over to the women menders:  at night, to borrow a vivid expression from Lise, he was “batty in the belfry” on the subject of socialism.  Unlike the barber, whom he could not abide, for him the cleavage of the world was between labour and capital instead of man and woman; his philosophy was stern and naturalistic; the universe—­the origin of which he did not discuss—­just an accidental assemblage of capricious forces over which human intelligence was one day to triumph.  Squatting on the lowest step, his face upturned, by the light of the arc sputtering above the street he looked like a yellow frog, his eager eyes directed toward Janet, whom he suspected of intelligence.

“If there was a God, a nice, kind, all-powerful God, would he permit what happened in one of the loom-rooms last week?  A Polak girl gets her hair caught in the belt pfff!” He had a marvellously realistic gift when it came to horrors:  Janet felt her hair coming out by the roots.  Although she never went to church, she did not like to think that no God existed.  Of this Mr. Shivers was very positive.  Edward, too, listened uneasily, hemmed and hawed, making ineffectual attempts to combat Mr. Shivers’s socialism with a deeply-rooted native individualism that Shivers declared as defunct as Christianity.

“If it is possible for the workingman to rise under a capitalistic system, why do you not rise, then?  Why do I not rise?  I’m as good as Ditmar, I’m better educated, but we’re all slaves.  What right has a man to make you and me work for him just because he has capital?”

“Why, the right of capital,” Edward would reply.

Mr. Shivers, with the manner of one dealing with an incurable romanticism and sentimentality, would lift his hands in despair.  And in spite of the fact that Janet detested him, he sometimes exercised over her a paradoxical fascination, suggesting as he did unexplored intellectual realms.  She despised her father for not being able to crush the little man.  Edward would make pathetic attempts to capture the role Shivers had appropriated, to be the practical party himself, to convict Shivers of idealism.  Socialism scandalized him, outraged, even more than atheism, something within him he held sacred, and he was greatly annoyed because he was unable adequately to express this feeling.