"How can he?" Arnold asked. "There is a policeman within a few yards of him. The law stands always in the way."
"The law!" she repeated, scornfully. "It is a pleasant word, that, which you use. The law is the artificial bogey made by the men who possess to keep those others in the gutter. And they tell me that there are half a million of them in London—and they suffer—like that. Could your courts of justice hold half a million law-breakers who took an overcoat from a better clad man, or the price of a meal from a sleek passer-by, or bread from the shop which taunted their hunger? They do not know their strength, those who suffer."
Arnold looked at her in sheer amazement. It was surely a strange woman who spoke! There was no sympathy in her face or tone. The idea of giving alms to the man seemed never to have occurred to her. She spoke with clouded face, as one in anger.
"Don't you believe," he asked, "in the universal principle, the survival of the fittest? Where there is wealth there must be poverty."
She laughed.
"Change your terms," she suggested; "where there are robbers there must be victims. But one may despise the victims all the same. One may find their content, or rather their inaction, ignoble."
"Generally speaking, it is the industrious who prosper," he affirmed.
She shook her head.
"If that were so, all would be well," she declared. "As a matter of fact, it is entirely an affair of opportunity and temperament."
"Why, you are a socialist," he said. "You should come and talk to my friend Isaac."