Finally, over their coffee, they talked of what the play—already assumed successful and important—would mean to Socialism.
Mary was but a new convert. Her ideas about the cause to which, in her young enthusiasm, she had pledged herself were nebulous. She had much to learn. She was learning much. Yet her heart warmed up as Aubrey Flood let his words go, and told her of his ambitions that this play should indeed be a great thing for the Cause. He was a clever and well-known actor, a successful manager, under a new aspect altogether. She had met people like Aubrey Flood before, but no single one of them had ever shown her that beneath his life of the theatre lay any deep and underlying motive, and it uplifted her, she felt that strange sense of brotherhood which those who are united against the world always know. She recognised that Aubrey Flood, beneath his exterior, was as keen and convinced a Socialist as Fabian Rose, or Mr. Conrad. The fact substantiated her own new theories and induced in her the throbbing sense of being an officer in a great army.
"I wish I had known before," she said to him as they were preparing to leave the restaurant. "I wish I had known before, then, indeed, I might have had an ethical motive in my life, which I now see and feel has been lacking for a long time."
"You are now," he answered, "catching something of our own enthusiasm, and it is by the most extraordinary chain of events that Rose and you, Conrad and myself have come into touch with the Duke of Paddington himself. Conrad, of course, would tell you that Providence had designed it. I cannot go so far as that. I simply say that it is chance. All the same, it is a most marvellous thing. We are going to startle England."
Mary looked at him for a moment. They had just got into the hansom which was to drive them back to the theatre.
"I don't see, Mr. Flood," she said in a quiet voice, "why it is any more easy to believe that something you call 'chance' brings things about than it is difficult to believe that something Mr. Conrad calls 'Providence' should effect the same results."
Flood looked at her in his turn. Here was a most strange young lady of the stage, indeed. He tried to think of something to say, but could not. The simple logic of her answer forbade retort.
Indeed, why should any one want to gather up "coincidences," call the controlling power of them "chance," and not admit that Providence itself had ordered them?
He could not think beyond that, and he was silent. He remembered his old father at the country rectory. He remembered the simple faith of his father and mother and his sisters, and he realised with a sudden shock of pain that the reason why he strove to call the strange Directorship of the affairs of life by a name which had no especial meaning was because he was not prepared to submit to the teachings and the order of the Faith.
Mary also seemed to realise that her words had struck home to a heart which was not yet entirely atrophied by the rush of life in the world of the stage.