Everett glanced up quickly.
“I mean the man who wrote those articles on the ‘Social Ideals of Jesus,’” added Anna.
“Do you like them?” asked Everett.
“I do not know how to answer that question,” said Anna, musingly; “perhaps you hardly can say you like what makes you thoroughly uncomfortable. What he says of the immorality of a life of selfish ease appeals to me powerfully.”
“It is a great arraignment,” said Everett, working on in apparent absorbedness.
“What stirs me so deeply,” continued Anna, “is that this writer not only says what I believe to be true, but that he makes you feel a sense of power, authority, finality almost, in the way he says it. And by that, you know, I do not mean that he is authoritative or autocratic; it is simply that he writes as one who sees, who knows, who has gone beyond the mists of doubt and has a clear vision.”
“You are quite right, Mrs. Burgess,” said Everett, quietly, looking up from his work, his eyes kindling with unwonted light. “John Gregory is a man of his generation—a seer; as you say, one who sees. He is my master. You did not know, perhaps, that I am a socialist?”
“No,” Anna said simply; “I do not even rightly know what a socialist is.”
“It is, as far as my personal definition is concerned,—there are a dozen others,—a man who believes that the aim of individual and private gain and advantage, to the ignoring of the interests of his fellow-men, is immoral; this, whether it is the struggle for the man’s salvation in a future life, or his social or material advancement in this.”
Anna looked very sober. In a moment of silence, she was asking herself, “I wonder what becomes of people who are forced into lives of selfish inaction; who have to live luxuriously when they don’t want to; who are obliged to go in carriages when they far prefer walking; and who find their hands tied whenever they seek any line of effort not absolutely conventional?”