"Some day, perhaps sooner than we think, we shall have the true Armageddon, the general strike, when the last sleeping toiler shall have aroused himself from his lethargy to rise up and come into his inheritance." He seemed to detach himself from her, his eyes became more luminous.
"`Like unseen music in the night,'—so Sorel writes about it. They may scoff at it, the wise ones, but it will come. `Like music in the night!' You respond to that!"
Again she was silent. They had walked on, through familiar streets that now seemed strange.
"You respond—I can tell," he said. "And yet, you are not like these others, like me, even. You are an American. And yet you are not like most of your countrywomen."
"Why do you say that?"
"I will tell you. Because they are cold, most of them, and trivial, they do not feel. But you—you can feel, you can love and hate. You look calm and cold, but you are not—I knew it when I looked at you, when you came up to me."
She did not know whether to resent or welcome his clairvoyance, his assumption of intimacy, his air of appropriation. But her curiosity was tingling.
"And you?" she asked. "Your name is Rolfe, isn't it?"
He assented. "And yours?"
She told him.