"The little devils!" he thought in his righteous wrath. "I'll teach 'em, all right."
As it was necessary to break the farcical silence he said in a voice too loud for the small library. "Well, what is it about socialism that you don't just know? Mrs. Dwight told me you had read some."
"There is one thing I want to say before we begin," said Aileen in her high light impertinent voice, "and that is that if there is one thing that makes us more angry than another it is to be called bourgeois."
"And ain't you?"
"We are not. I suppose your Marx didn't know the difference, although he is said to have married well, but bourgeois for centuries in Europe had meant middle-class. Just that and nothing more. Marx had no right to pervert an honest historic old word into something so different and so obnoxious."
"To Marx all capitalists were in the same class. I suppose what you mean is that you society folks call yourselves aristocrats, even when you have less capital than some of them that can't get in."
"Sure thing. Take it from me."
He gazed at her astounded, and once more had recourse to his rather heavy sarcasm.
"Even when they use slang."
"Oh, we're never afraid to—like lots of the middle-class—bourgeois.
Too sure of ourselves to care a hang what any one thinks of us."