"It would be a bad thing if the law was what she lays down. I think she is more likely to do harm than good to any cause she sustains."
"My! I am afraid you are not very advanced, Miss Ballinger," said the little lady, with a twinkling eye. "Here we have to keep going all the time, or we get unhooked, and the train goes on without us. Lady Clydesdale is a powerful engine. Some of her opinions, from a member of the British aristocracy, have been an eye-opener to us. But we of the press, of course, are bound to catch on, and support her in her levelling views—whether we quite believe them or not," she added, laughing.
"In some ways you seem to be more 'respecters of persons' than we," said Grace. "If the 'level' you preach is the broad humanity level, irrespective of wealth, or brains, or race, how are you going to reconcile your attitude towards negroes, whom you will not associate with, nor even allow to sit down at a public table with you?"
"Well, there are reasons for that," returned Miss Pie, nodding her cropped head vigorously. "But, apart from other considerations, the prejudices of race are not to be argued about. They may be just as irrational as the repugnance some people have to snakes, some to cats, some to spiders. But you were asking what 'level' we preach. Why, the level of success and prosperity, to be sure! We say one man is as good as another, if he is only successful; and if we educate the poor, and fire them with ambition, why should not every one be prosperous? Why should there be those terrible inequalities of fortune?"
"Unless you can establish an equality of brain, of physical strength and energy, how is it possible that all men shall be equal? It was never so from the beginning of time. Were Cain and Abel equal? Your country being comparatively new, there is a greater demand for laborers in every field—a greater space for labor. It is not so with us; it will not be so with you some day. And to my thinking Lady Clydesdale's socialistic doctrines are calculated to make people dissatisfied with 'that state of life unto which it hath pleased God to call' them."
The little lady rubbed her hands, and laughed.
"I am quite satisfied with mine—especially to-night. It has been real nice to have a talk with you, Miss Ballinger. We get into such a groove of thinking! You take one right off the line, back into the tracks of the Old World."
And then some man came up, and the conversation ended.
CHAPTER XIX
The morning after this dinner, Mordaunt, looking up from his newspaper, said with a laugh, "Well! You've done it this time, Gracey—you profited by experience, and were civil to that jolly little woman who sat next me at dinner. I didn't know she was a press writer till we were well through, but we got on like a house a-fire, and here is your reward and mine."