16.  I had set out to educate Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver in the things I thought she needed to know.  A part of my programme was to find some people of modern sympathies whom she might meet without offence to her old prejudices.  The first person I thought of was Mrs. Jessie Frothingham, who was the head of a fashionable girls’ school, just around the corner from Miss Abercrombie’s where Sylvia herself had received the finishing touch.  Mrs. Frothingham’s was as exclusive and expensive a school as the most proper person could demand, and great was Sylvia’s consternation when I told her that its principal was a member of the Socialist party, and made no bones about speaking in public for us.

How in the world did she manage it?  For one thing, I answered, she ran a good school—­nobody had ever been heard to deny that.  For another, she was an irresistibly serene and healthy person, who would look one of her millionaire “papas” in the eye and tell him what was what with so much decision; it would suddenly occur to the great man that if his daughter could be made into so capable a woman, he would not care what ticket she might vote.

Then too, it was testimony to the headway we are making that we are ceasing to be dangerous, and getting to be picturesque.  In these days of strenuous social competition, when mammas are almost at their wits’ end for some new device, when it costs incredible sums to make no impression at all—­here was offered a new and inexpensive way of being unique.  There could be no question that men were getting to like serious women; the most amazing subjects were coming up at dinner-parties, and you might hear the best people speak disrespectfully of their own money, which means that the new Revolution will have not merely its “Egalité Orleans,” but also some of the ladies of his family!

I telephoned from Sylvia’s house to Mrs. Frothingham, who answered:  “Wouldn’t you like Mrs. van Tuiver to hear a speech?  I am to speak next week at the noon-day Wall Street meeting.”  I passed the question on, and Sylvia answered with an exclamation of delight:  “Would a small boy like to attend a circus?”

It was arranged that Sylvia was to take us in her car.  You may picture me with my grand friends—­an old speckled hen in the company of two golden pheasants.  I kept very quiet and let them get acquainted, knowing that my cause was safe in the hands of one so perfectly tailored as Mrs. Frothingham.

Sylvia expressed her delight at the idea of hearing a Socialist speech, and her amazement that the head of Mrs. Frothingham’s should be so courageous, and meantime we threaded our way through the tangle of trucks and surface-cars on Broadway, and came to the corner of Wall Street.  Here Mrs. Frothingham said she would get out and walk; it was quite likely that someone might recognise Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver, and she ought not to be seen arriving with the speaker.  Sylvia, who would not willingly have committed a breach of etiquette towards a bomb-throwing anarchist, protested at this, but Mrs. Frothingham laughed good-naturedly, saying that it would be time enough for Mrs. van Tuiver to commit herself when she knew what she believed.