'Oh, because you and your like have your fixed ideas of the upper class and the lower. One social type fills up your horizon. You are not interested in any other, and, indeed, you know nothing of any other.'
She looked at him defiantly. Everything about her to-night was splendid and regal—her dress of black and white brocade, the diamonds at her throat, the carriage of her head, nay, the marks of experience and living on the dark subtle face.
'Perhaps not,' he replied: 'it is enough for one life to try and make out where the English working class is tending to.'
'You are quite wrong, utterly wrong. The man who keeps his eye only on the lower class will achieve nothing. What can the idealist do without the men of action—the men who can take his beliefs and make them enter by violence into existing institutions? And the men of action are to be found with us.'
'It hardly looks just now as if the upper class was to go on enjoying a monopoly of them,' he said, smiling.
'Then appearances are deceptive. The populace supplies mass and weight—nothing else. What you want is to touch the leaders, the men and women whose voices carry, and then your populace would follow hard enough. For instance,'—and she dropped her aggressive tone and spoke with a smiling kindness,—'come down next Saturday to my little Surrey cottage; you shall see some of these men and women there, and I will make you confess when you go away that you have profited your workmen more by deserting them than by staying with them. Will you come?'
'My Sundays are too precious to me just now, Madame de Netteville. Besides, my firm conviction is that the upper class can produce a Brook Farm, but nothing more. The religious movement of the future will want a vast effusion of feeling and passion to carry it into action, and feeling and passion are only to be generated in sufficient volume among the masses, where the vested interests of all kinds are less tremendous. You upper-class folk have your part, of course. Woe betide you if you shirk it—but——'
'Oh, let us leave it alone,' she said with a little shrug. 'I know you would give us all the work and refuse us all the profits. We are to starve for your workman, to give him our hearts and purses and everything we have, not that we may hoodwink him—which might be worth doing—but that he may rule us. It is too much!'
'Very well,' he said drily, his colour rising. 'Very well, let it be too much.'
And, dropping his lounging attitude, he stood erect, and she saw that he meant to be going. Her look swept over him from head to foot—over the worn face with its look of sensitive refinement and spiritual force, the active frame, the delicate but most characteristic hand. Never had any man so attracted her for years; never had she found it so difficult to gain a hold. Eugénie de Netteville, poseuse, schemer, woman of the world that she was, was losing command of herself.