Being absolutely sure who it was, she wanted to find out who it really was.
In her frantic curiosity she remembered that her husband had stripped off a corner of the paper, dipped it in the stove, lighted his pipe with it, thrown it flaming on the floor, spat it out with practised accuracy, and trodden it as he went away. Mrs. Nuddle ran to pick it up.
On the charred remnant she read:
The Beautiful Miss.... One of London’s reigning beaut.... daughter of Sir Joseph W.... doing farm work on the estate in....
Mrs. Nuddle sniffed no more. She flopped to a backless chair and squatted in a curious burlesque of Rodin’s statue of “The Thinker.” One heavy hand pinched her dewlap. Her hair was damp with steam and raining about her face. Her old waist was half buttoned, and no one would have regretted if it had been all buttoned. She was as plebeian as an ash-can and as full of old embers.
She was still immobilized when her husband came in. Now he gasped. His wife was loafing! sitting down! in the middle of the day! Thinking was loafing with her. He was supposed to do the family thinking. It was doubly necessary that she should work now, because he was on a strike. He had been to a meeting of other thinkers––ground and lofty thinkers who believed that they had discovered the true evil of the world and its remedy.
The evil was the possession of money by those who had accumulated it. The remedy was to take it away from them. Then the poor would be rich, which was right, and the rich would be poor, which was righter still.
It was well known that the only way to end the bad habit of work was to quit working. And the way to insure universal prosperity was to burn down the factories and warehouses, destroy all machinery and beggar the beasts who invented, invested, built, and hired and tried to get rich by getting riches.
This program would take some little time to perfect, and meanwhile Jake was willing that his wife should work. Indeed, a sharp fear almost unmanned him––what if she should fall sick and have to loaf in the horsepital? What if she should die? O Gord! Her little children would be left motherless––and fatherless, for he would, of course, be too busy saving the world to save his children. He would lose, too, the prestige enjoyed only by those who have their money in their wife’s name. So he spoke to her with more than his wonted gentleness: