Hindwood pulled himself together and bent forward, glowering into the fire. “I can't understand all this talk of sacrifice. It sounds so confoundedly unpractical. As far as I can make out, your husband's idea of virtue was to abstain from everything that makes life worth living. He didn't profit any one by abstaining. All he did was to narrow himself. If he'd wanted to be an ascetic, why couldn't he have done the thing thoroughly and played the game? There was no need to drag you into it.”
“There was no need,” she assented quietly, “but to have me and to withstand me made him appear more dedicated. He tantalized himself with the thought of me and used me as a knife with which to gash himself. I was a part of the road to Calvary he was treading in order that Russia might be saved. It gratified his pride to make the road spectacular. Then, when we were in exile and he was no longer a power, Santa came, the ruthless idealist—his very opposite.”
“Ruthless, perhaps! But I shouldn't call her an idealist.”
“She is—an idealist who, to gain her ends, stoops to any baseness. She's an avenging angel, beautiful and sinister. She's one of the few revolutionaries who knows what she wants; because she knows, she gets it. Varensky never knew. His head was in the clouds. He lost sight of his purpose in a mist of words.”
“What does she want?” As he asked the question, he glanced back at her where she gleamed like a phantom.
“She wants——” There was a pause during which the only sound was the struggle of the distant surf. “She wants to make men pay for what they do to children. All her crimes—— She's a mother, robbed of her young; in her own fierce way, she's taken all the children of the world to her breast.”
“But men don't do anything.”
She caught his tone of puzzlement. “Oh yes. Each generation commits ferocious sins against the coming generation that can't protect itself. It's children who pay for wars and every social injustice. Men live like a marauding army, pillaging the land between birth and death. They pass on and leave to children the settlement of their reckless debts. Take this latest war; five million children in Europe alone are dying of starvation at this moment. Santa's marked down the men who are responsible for their suffering; silently, one by one, she drugs them with her beauty and exacts the penalty.”
“Prince Rogovich?”
“Probably. He was raising funds for a new carnage.”