lete surrender of the tools to the workers. For the capitalists are
parasites who suck your blood and your children's blood. From now
on there can be no compromise, no truce, no peace until they are
exterminated. It is war." War! In Janet's soul the word resounded like
a tocsin. And again, as when swept along East Street with the mob, that
sense of identity with these people and their wrongs, of submergence
with them in their cause possessed her. Despite her ancestry, her lot
was cast with them. She, too, had been precariously close to poverty,
had known the sordidness of life; she, too, and Lise and Hannah had been
duped and cheated of the fairer things. Eagerly she had drunk in the
vocabulary of that new and terrible philosophy. The master class must
be exterminated! Was it not true, if she had been of that class, that
Ditmar would not have dared to use and deceive her? Why had she never
thought of these things before?... The light was beginning to fade, the
great meeting was breaking up, and yet she lingered. At the foot of
the bandstand steps, conversing with a small group of operatives that
surrounded him, she perceived the man who had just spoken. And as she
stood hesitating, gazing at him, a desire to hear more, to hear all
of this creed he preached, that fed the fires in her soul, urged her
forward. Her need, had she known it, was even greater than that of these
toilers whom she now called comrades. Despite some qualifying reserve
she felt, and which had had to do with the redness of his lips, he
attracted her. He had a mind, an intellect, he must possess stores of
the knowledge for which she thirsted; he appeared to her as one who had
studied and travelled, who had ascended heights and gained the wider
view denied her. A cynical cosmopolitanism would have left her cold,
but here, apparently, was a cultivated man burning with a sense of the
world's wrongs. Ditmar, who was to have led her out of captivity,
had only thrust her the deeper into bondage.... She joined the group,
halting on the edge of it, listening. Rolfe was arguing with a man
about the labour unions, but almost at once she knew she had fixed his
attention. From time to time, as he talked, his eyes sought hers boldly,
and in their dark pupils were tiny points of light that stirred and
confused her, made her wonder what was behind them, in his soul. When he
had finished his argument, he singled her out.

"You do not work in the mills?" he asked.

"N