He shook his head—with him, a gesture that conveyed the full strength of negation. "We are on opposite sides of a line across which friendship is impossible. I could not be your friend without being false to myself. You couldn't be mine unless you were by some accident flung into the working class and forced to adopt it as your own. Even then you'd probably remain what you are. Only a small part of the working class as yet is at heart of the working class. Most of us secretly—almost openly—despise the life of work, and dream and hope a time of fortune that will put us up among the masters and the idlers." His expressive eyes became eloquent. "The false and shallow ideas that have been educated into us for ages can't be uprooted in a few brief years."
She felt the admiration she did not try to conceal. She saw the proud and splendid conception of the dignity of labor—of labor as a blessing, not a curse, as a badge of aristocracy and not of slavery and shame. "You really believe that, don't you?" she said. "I know it's true. I say I believe it—who doesn't SAY so? But I don't FEEL it."
"That's honest," said he heartily. "That's some thing to build on."
"And I'm going to build!" cried she. "You'll help me—won't you? I know, it's a great deal to ask. Why should you take the time and the trouble to bother with one single unimportant person."
"That's the way I spend my life—in adding one man or one woman to our party—one at a time. It's slow building, but it's the only kind that endures. There are twelve hundred of us now—twelve hundred voters, I mean. Ten years ago there were only three hundred. We'd expand much more rapidly if it weren't for the constant shifts of population. Our men are forced to go elsewhere as the pressure of capitalism gets too strong. And in place of them come raw emigrants, ignorant, full of dreams of becoming capitalists and exploiters of their fellow men and idlers. Ambition they call it. Ambition!" He laughed. "What a vulgar, what a cruel notion of rising in the world! To cease to be useful, to become a burden to others! ... Did you ever think how many poor creatures have to toil longer hours, how many children have to go to the factory instead of to school, in order that there may be two hundred and seven automobiles privately kept in this town and seventy-four chauffeurs doing nothing but wait upon their masters? Money doesn't grow on bushes, you know. Every cent of it has to be earned by somebody—and earned by MANUAL labor."
"I must think about that," she said—for the first time as much interested in what he was saying as in the man himself. No small triumph for Victor over the mind of a woman dominated, as was Jane Hastings, by the sex instinct that determines the thoughts and actions of practically the entire female sex.
"Yes—think about it," he urged. "You will never see it—or anything—until you see it for yourself."
"That's the way your party is built—isn't it?" inquired she. "Of those who see it for themselves."
"Only those," replied he. "We want no others."
"Not even their votes?" said she shrewdly.