"I'll be hanged if I give my cigars to that bounder. The kitchen is the place for him."
"But not for us. And our minds are quite made up, you know. We are going to study with him just to find out what these strange animals called socialists are like. He is queer enough, to begin, with. And the knowledge may prove useful one of these days…. If you won't give me one I'll send James out—"
Mortimer handed over one of his choice cigars with ill grace, and Alexina returned to the library. Aileen was informing Mr. Kirkpatrick how intensely she disliked Marx's beard, not only as she had seen it in a photograph, but as she had smelt it in Spargo's too vivid description.
He rose awkwardly as she entered, but he rose. She handed him the cigar and struck a match and held it to one end while he drew at the other. Their faces were close and she gave him a smile of warm and spontaneous friendliness.
Thought Mr. Kirkpatrick: "Oh, Lord, she's got me. I'd better make tracks out of here. If she was a vamp like that Bascom woman she wouldn't get me one little bit. Plenty of them where I come from. But she's plain goddess with eyes like headlights on an engine."
Perturbed as he was, however, he resumed his seat and drew appreciatively at the finest cigar that had ever come his way. It had the opportune effect of causing his class-hatred to flame afresh. No fear that he would be made soft by teaching in the homes of these pampered cats. For the moment he hated Alexina, seated in a carved high-back Italian chair like a young queen on a throne.
"Well," he growled. "Let's get to business. I've brought Spargo. Marx is too much for me. He's terrible dull and involved. He was so taken up with his subject, I guess, that he forgot to learn how to write about it so's people without much time and education could understand without getting a pain in their beans. Of course I've heard him expounded many times from the platform, but there must have been about fifty Marxes, for I've heard—or read—just about that many expounders of him and no two agree so's you'd notice it. That, to my mind, is the only stumbling block for socialism—that we have a prophet who's so hard to understand.
"So, I've settled on Spargo. He has the name of being about the best student of Marx and of socialism generally—it's split up quite a bit—and he's easy reading. I fetched him along."
He produced "Socialism" from his hat and hesitated. "I don't know noth—a thing about teaching."
"Oh, don't let that worry you," drawled Sibyl Bascom in her low voluptuous voice and transfixing him with narrow swimming eyes; then as he refused to be overcome, she continued more humanly: "We've been to lots of classes, you know. There are all sorts of methods. Suppose one of us reads the first chapter aloud and then you expound. That is, we'll ask you questions."