“Pardon me, Mrs. Burgess, but you know I am not a Gregorian psalm myself, yet.”
Anna turned to him with her rare smile, less brilliant than clear and luminous.
“But I was so glad you came to the house, Professor Ward, and heard Mr. Gregory,” she said with gracious courtesy; “we cannot expect every one to follow out these new theories practically as we hope to do, but at least we want every one we care about to know really what they are.”
“Do you think that many of those present at your house that afternoon were inclined to accept Mr. Gregory’s gospel, if I may so call it?” asked Ward, respectfully.
“Of course not,” interjected Everett, “there was no one there but cranks and critics.”
Anna’s face clouded a little. “No,” she said simply. “Fulham is not a good field for such a message; it was quite different in Burlington. Most of them went away saying it would be very fine if it were not wholly impossible.”
“And it does not occur to you, does it, Mrs. Burgess,” Ward pressed the question with undisguised earnestness, “that perhaps they were right? that there is something to be said for the old order, as old as the race? that possibly certain distinctions are inherent in the nature of things? Such distinctions, for instance, as separate you,” and Ward gave the pronoun a freight of significance to carry, “from that man,” and he indicated a labourer who had just left the room with an immense box of merchandise on his broad, bent shoulders, and whose slow, heavy steps could now be heard on the stairs below.
He had struck the wrong chord.
“Professor Ward,” cried Anna, her voice even lower than its wont, but her emphasis the more intense, “did that man choose to be reduced to the life and little more than the faculties of a beast of burden, to be a brother to the ox, to live a blind, brutalized, animal existence, with neither joy nor star?”
She paused a moment, and then added, with indescribable pathos dimming the kindling light in her eyes:—