"Ah!" she laughed. "I brought you here to-night to tell you. You are going to give it them, my friend. With me to help you, perhaps, if you will have me. Will you? Look into my eyes and tell me that you see—that you understand?"
Her eyes were as the eyes of a siren, but still Dick did not lose his head.
"I see no other way of giving the people justice than by working on the lines I have been trying to work for years," he said.
"Yes, you do," she cried triumphantly. "You are a Labour man—a Socialist if you like. You have a vision of better conditions for the working classes in England—the British Isles. But what is that? What does it all amount to? Sticking-plasters, mon ami—sticking-plasters."
"Still, I do not understand," replied Dick.
"But you do," she persisted, still with her great, lustrous eyes laughing into his, in spite of a certain seriousness shining from them. "Think a minute. Here we are at a crisis in the world's history. Unless a mighty effort is made now, power, property, everything will drift back to the old ruling classes, and that will mean what it has always meant. Still the same accursed anomalies; still the same blinding, numbing, crushing poverty on the one hand; still the same pampered luxury and criminal waste on the other. All things must be new, my friend—new!"
"But how?"
"In one word—Bolshevism. No; don't be startled. Not the miserable caricature, the horrible nightmare which has frightened the dull-minded British but a glorious thing! Justice for humanity, the world for the people! That's what it means. Not for one country, but for all the countries—for the wide world. Don't you see? The world must become one, because humanity is one. It must be. Disease in any part of the organism hurts the whole body. If wrong is done in Russia, England has to pay; therefore, all reform must be world wide; right must be done everywhere."
"Words, words, words," quoted Dick.
"And more than words, my friend. The most glorious ideal the world has ever known. And every ideal is an unborn event."