old religion teaches that
the world is cruel for most of us, but if we are obedient and humble we
shall be rewarded in heaven." Rolfe laughed. "The masters approve of that
teaching. They would not have it changed. But for us it is war. We'll
strike and keep on striking, we'll break their machinery, spoil their
mills and factories, and drive them out. And even if we do not win at
once, it is better to suffer and die fighting than to have the life
ground out of us--is it not?"

"Yes, it is better!" she agreed. The passion in her voice did not escape
him.

"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.

"You have been in America long--your family?"

"Very long," she said. "But you speak Italian, and Rolfe isn't an Italian
name."

"My father was an Englishman, an artist, who lived in Italy--my mother a
peasant woman from Lombardy, such as these who come to work in the mills.
When she was young she was beautiful--like a Madonna by an old master."

"An old master?"

"The old masters are the great painters who lived in Italy four hundred
years ago. I was named after one of them--the greatest. I am called
Leonard. He was Leonardo da Vinci."

The name, as Rolfe pronounced it, stirred her. And art, painting! It was
a realm unknown to her, and yet the very sugges