d every day. Then
enter the man, offering her some comfort and pleasure and love. Do you
blame her?"

"You must give me her address," Alice said softly.

Oscar nodded. "Good enough, comrade. Jeff has looked out for her, but
she needs a woman friend." With a sweep of the hand he went back to
the impersonal. "Her trouble was economic, just as ours is. Look at
it. We've got a perfect self-regulating system that adjusts itself
automatically to bring hard times when we're most prosperous. Give us
big crops and boom times, and we head straight for a depression. Why?"
He interrupted himself with a fit of coughing, but presently began
again, talking also with his swift supple hands. "Because then the
foreign market will be glutted. Surplus goods won't sell abroad. The
manufacturer, unable to dispose of his produce, will cut down his force
or close his plant. Labor, out of work, cannot buy. So every branch
of industry suffers because we're too well off. It's a vicious absurd
circle born of the system under which we live. Under socialism the
remedy would be merely to work less for a time until the surplus was
used. It would affect nobody injuriously. The whole thing's as simple as
A B C."

It had been plain to the first casual glance of James that the little
Socialist was far gone. The amazing thing was the eagerness with which
his spirit dominated the body in such ill case. He was alive to the
fingertips, though he was already in the Valley of the Shadow. To the
lawyer there was something eerie about it all. Marchant was done with
the business of living. Why didn't he lie down and accept the verdict?

But to Alice it was God-like, a thing to stand uncovered before. His
remedies might be all wrong. Probably they were. None the less his vital
courage for life took her by the throat.

Jeff nodded at the invalid cheerfully. "We're going to change all that,
Oscar. Into this little old world a new soul is being born. Or perhaps
the old soul is being born again."

The Socialist caught at this swiftly. "Yes, we're going to change this
terrible waste of human lives. I see a new world, where men will live
like brothers and not like wolves rending each other. There poverty will
be blotted out... and disease and all mean and cruel things that hamper
and destroy life. Law and justice will walk hand in hand through a land
of peace and plenty. Our cities, the expression of our social life, will
be clean and sunny and beautiful because t