The real reason for the postponement, she managed to convince herself, was her talk with Mrs. Dodson.
It occurred at a little dinner party given by Mrs. Weidely, a lady of the most unimpeachable conventionality, who satisfied an unsuspected craving of her nature by gathering about her the most thoroughly unconventional people she could find. Had her husband, now deceased, not been the upright president of a very large bank, and were her house not, in consequence, situated in a location of indisputable respectability, these dynamic assemblies would have been held with the attentive co-operation of the police, a condition with which some of her guests as a matter of fact were not at all unfamiliar.
Mrs. Dodson, who went out very little, was present chiefly because Mrs. Weidely was a friend of long standing, whose almost tearful assurance that her absence would ruin the evening, had been too touching for resistance. Mrs. Dodson was a kind-hearted, if not particularly credulous, woman.
When Judith arrived, having been invited, she suspected, chiefly to give "balance" to the affair, a young man with a narrow, equine face and a great deal of coarse black hair, who she afterwards learned was named Klemm, was standing in front of the fireplace, his legs wide apart, and talking very rapidly, in a high, thin voice, punctuating his sentences with rapier-like movements of his long, sharp fingers.
He was a poet, whose ready flow of language, with its glowing flights of hyperbole, had once reacted unfavourably upon a too literal-minded policeman, with a consequent very actual fortnight in jail. It had been a distinctly unpleasant experience, but one which he would not have escaped for worlds. Its immediate effect was a volume of lurid verse, which had a very wide sale. And ever afterward he was able to denounce things as they were, with the assurance of one who knew whereof he spoke. He was young in years, but—he had lived—he had suffered....
"Charity—pah!" he declared with finality. "It is futile, childish, debasing—both to them that give and them that receive. It is abomination—the more organised, the worse it becomes. It is like all—reform." The fine scorn with which he spoke would have made the word shrivel up and disappear, had it been a material organism.
"And for reform you would substitute—revolution?" Judith was conscious of Mrs. Dodson's firm, level voice, contrasting rather unexpectedly with the uncertain falsetto of Mr. Klemm.
"Revolution—yes!" The accompanying gesture was splendidly dramatic. "A man's word," he added, sternly, but unfortunately in a tone which was somewhat feminine.
"So far as I know," said Mrs. Dodson, quietly, without any dramatic effect, but in a way which carried conviction, "the real progress of the world has been by evolution. Revolution has usually been followed by reaction, the net advantage being no greater than is secured day after day, year after year, by the despised reformers. Most of the revolutionists I know—talk. The world needs—work!"
It was a stinging rebuke. Mr. Klemm, not easily silenced, had no more to say. He seemed relieved when dinner was announced.