She told me a long time afterwards what had been her emotions during these early talks.  It was the first time in her life that she had ever listened to ideas that were hostile to her order, and she did so with tremblings and hesitations, combating at every step an impulse to flee to the shelter of conventionality.  She was more shocked by my last revelation than she let me suspect.  It counted for little that I had succeeded in trapping her in proposing for herself the economic programme of Socialism, for what terrifies her class is not our economic programme, it is our threat of slave-rebellion.  I had been brought up in a part of the world where democracy is a tradition, a word to conjure with, and I supposed that this would be the case with any American—­that I would only have to prove that Socialism was democracy applied to industry.  How could I have imagined the kind of “democracy” which had been taught to Sylvia by her Uncle Mandeville, the politician of the family, who believed that America was soon to have a king, to keep the “foreign riff-raff” in its place!

14.  At this time I was living in a three-roomed apartment in one of the new “model tenements” on the East Side.  I had a saying about the place, that it was “built for the proletariat and occupied by cranks.”  What an example for Sylvia of the futility of charity—­the effort on the part of benevolent capitalists to civilise the poor by putting bath-tubs in their homes, and the discovery that the graceless creatures were using them for the storage of coals!

Having heard these strange stories, Sylvia was anxious to visit me, and I was, of course, glad to invite her.  I purchased a fancy brand of tea, and some implements for the serving of it, and she came, and went into raptures over my three rooms and bath, no one of which would have made more than a closet in her own apartments.  I suspected that this was her Southern noblesse oblige, but I knew also that in my living room there were some rows of books, which would have meant more to Sylvia van Tuiver just then than the contents of several clothes-closets.

I was pleased to discover that my efforts had not been wasted.  She had been thinking, and she had even found time, in the midst of her distractions, to read part of a book.  In the course of our talks I had mentioned Veblen, and she had been reading snatches of his work on the Leisure Class, and I was surprised, and not a little amused, to observe her reaction to it.

When I talked about wages and hours of labour, I was dealing with things that were remote from her, and difficult to make real; but Veblen’s theme, the idle rich, and the arts and graces whereby they demonstrate their power, was the stuff of which her life was made.  The subtleties of social ostentation, the minute distinctions between the newly-rich and the anciently-rich, the solemn certainties of the latter and the quivering anxieties of the former—­all those were things which Sylvia knew as a bird knows the way of the wind.  To see the details of them analysed in learned, scientific fashion, explained with great mouthfuls of words which one had to look up in the dictionary—­that was surely a new discovery in the book-world!  “Conspicuous leisure!” “Vicarious consumption of goods!” “Oh, de-ah me, how que-ah!” exclaimed Sylvia.