A SENTIMENTAL REBELLION

I came not to send peace, but a sword.... I am come to send fire on
the earth.

I

Her living room was a material projection of Yetta Silverman's soul. The
apartment on the north side of Tompkins Square, was small, sunny, and
comfortable. From its windows in spring and summer she could see the
boys and girls playing around the big, bare park, and when her eyes grew
tired of the street she rested them on her beloved books and pictures.
On one wall hung the portraits of Herzen, Bakounine and Kropotkin--the
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of the anarchistic movement, as she piously
called them. Other images of the propaganda were scattered over the
walls: Netschajew--the St. Paul of the Nihilists--Ravachol, Octave
Mirbeau, Jean Grave, Reclus, Spies, Parsons, Engels, and Lingg--the last
four victims of the Haymarket affair, and the Fenians, Allen, Larkin,
and O'Brien, the Manchester martyrs. Among the philosophers, poets, and
artists were Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Max Stirner--a rare drawing--Ibsen,
Thoreau, Emerson--the great American individualists--Beethoven, Zola,
Richard Strauss, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Gorky, Walt Whitman, Dostoiewsky,
Mazzini, Rodin, Constantin Meunier, Shelley, Turgenieff, Bernard Shaw,
and finally the kindly face and intellectual head of the lawyer who so
zealously defended the Chicago anarchists. This diversified group,
together with much revolutionary literature, poems, pamphlets, the works
of Proudhon, Songs Before Sunrise, by Swinburne, and a beautiful etching
of Makart's proletarian Christ, completed, with an old square
pianoforte, the ensemble of an individual room, a room that expressed,
as her admirers said, the strong, suffering soul of Yetta Silverman,
Russian anarchist, agitator, and exile.

"Come in," she cried out in her sharp, though not unpleasant, voice. A
thin young man entered. She clapped her hands.

"Oh, so you changed your mind!" He looked at her over his glasses with
his weak, blue eyes, the white of which predominated. Simply dressed, he
nevertheless gave the impression of superior social station. He was of
the New England theological-seminary type--narrow-chested, gaunt as to
visage, by temperament drawn to theology, or, in default of religious
belief, an ardent enthusiast in sociology. The contracted temples,
uncertain gaze, and absence of fulness beneath the eyes betrayed the
unimaginative man. Art was a sealed book to him, though taxatio