had done. Even the dramatic critics, who looked as if
they hated everybody, had been seen to gaze upon her with rare approval.

But tonight Clavering had a glimpse of something more than a magnetism
for which she was not responsible and to which she had seemed singularly
indifferent. It was quite evident that he was watching charm in action.
She was sparkling and exerting herself, talking brilliantly and
illuminatingly upon the chaos still known as Europe, and it was patent
that her knowledge was not derived from newspapers or drawing-room
gossip. Her personal acquaintance of public men had evidently been
extensive before the war, and she had as manifestly continued to see
those in and out of office in Vienna and Buda Pesth throughout all the
later fluctuations. Her detestation of the old German militaristic party
was unmitigated and she spoke of the late ruler of the Dual Empire and of
his yearning heir with no respect whatever. With other intelligent
people she believed Bolshevism to be an inevitable phase in a country as
backward and ignorant as Russia, but, to his surprise, she regarded the
Republican ideal of government as the highest that had yet been evolved
from finite minds, still far from their last and highest stages of
development. She believed that the only hope of the present civilization
was to avert at any cost the successful rise of the proletariat to power
until the governing and employing classes had learned sufficient wisdom
to conciliate it and treat it with the same impartial justice they now
reserved for themselves. ("And to educate themselves along the lines
laid down in 'The Mind in the Making,'" interpolated Clavering.)
Otherwise any victory the masses might achieve would be followed by the
same hideous results as in Russia--in other words, the same results that
had followed all servile uprisings since the dawn of history. When the
underdog, who has never felt anything but an underdog, with all the
misery and black injustice the word implies, finds himself on top he will
inevitably torture and murder his former oppressors. He hasn't the
intelligence to foresee the ultimate folly of his acts, or that the only
hope of the world is equal justice for all classes; he merely gratifies
his primitive instinct for vengeance--precisely the same today, as during
the first servile uprising of Rome--he butchers and slaughters and
wrecks, and then sinks with his own weight, while what brains are left