"Would you think I was a barbarian?"
"Certainly not a futile one," he answered.
They went in to dinner. It was a fixed principle of Fanny Piers' life to put her women friends next to their own young men, so that Eleanor found herself next to O'Bannon at dinner. He was on his hostess' right, Gore on her left, then Lydia and Tim and May and Piers, and Eleanor again. The arrangement suited Lydia very well. She went on baiting Gore. It suited Eleanor even better. She had known Noel Piers far too long to waste any time talking to him, and as this was the arrangement he preferred, they were almost friends. This left her free to talk to O'Bannon. Her native ability, joined to her personal interest in him, made her familiar with every aspect of his work. He talked shop to her and loved it. He was telling her of a case in which labor unions, with whose aims he himself as an individual was in sympathy, had made themselves amenable to the law. That was one of the penalties of a position like his. Piers caught a few words and leaned over.
"Well, I'm pretty liberal," he said—that well-known opening of the reactionary—"but I'm not in favor of labor."
"Not even for others, Noel," said Eleanor, who did not want to be interrupted.
"I mean labor unions," replied Piers, who, though not without humor in its proper place, had too much difficulty in expressing an idea to turn aside to laugh about it. "I hope you'll be firm with those fellows, O'Bannon. I hope you're not a socialist like Eleanor."
Piers had used the word "socialist" as a hate word, and expected to hear O'Bannon repudiate the suggestion as an insult. Instead he denied it as a fact.
"No," he said, "I'm not a socialist. I think you'll find lawyers conservative as a general thing. I believe in my platform—the equal administration of the present laws. That's radical enough—for the present."
Piers gave a slight snort. Everyone, he said, believed in that.
"I don't find they do—it isn't my experience," answered O'Bannon. "Some fellows broke up a socialist meeting the other evening in New York, and no one was punished, although not only were people injured, but even property was damaged." Eleanor was the only person who caught the "even." "You know very well that if the socialists broke in on a meeting of well-to-do citizens they would be sent up the river."