Miss Raeburn drew herself up, with a sharp dry look at Miss Boyce, which escaped every one but Lady Winterbourne.
"Oh! I am not a Radical!" said Marcella, half scornfully. "We Socialists don't fight for either political party as such. We take what we can get out of both."
"So you call yourself a Socialist? A real full-blown one?"
Lord Maxwell's pleasant tone masked the mood of a man who after a morning of hard work thinks himself entitled to some amusement at luncheon.
"Yes, I am a Socialist," she said slowly, looking at him. "At least I ought to be—I am in my conscience."
"But not in your judgment?" he said laughing. "Isn't that the condition of most of us?"
"No, not at all!" she exclaimed, both her vanity and her enthusiasm roused by his manner. "Both my judgment and my conscience make me a Socialist. It's only one's wretched love for one's own little luxuries and precedences—the worst part of one—that makes me waver, makes me a traitor! The people I worked with in London would think me a traitor often, I know."
"And you really think that the world ought to be 'hatched over again and hatched different'? That it ought to be, if it could be?"
"I think that things are intolerable as they are," she broke out, after a pause. "The London poor were bad enough; the country poor seem to me worse! How can any one believe that such serfdom and poverty—such mutilation of mind and body—were meant to go on for ever!"
Lord Maxwell's brows lifted. But it certainly was no wonder that Aldous should find those eyes of hers superb?