he first. It was the
apotheosis of cynicism, this reducing of a world to its lowest level.
And it had amused him to see his wife, a gentlewoman born, bewildered
before the chaos he depicted.

"But--it is German!" she had said.

"I bow before intelligence. It is German. Also it is Russian. Also it
is of all nations. All this talk now, of a League of Nations, a few dull
diplomats acting as God over the peoples of the earth!" His eyes blazed.
"While the true league, of the workers of the world, is already in
effect!"

But he watched her after that, not that he was afraid of her, but
because her re-action as a woman was important. He feared women in the
movement. It had its disciples, fervent and eloquent, paid and unpaid
women agitators, but he did not trust them. They were invariably women
without home ties, women with nothing to protect, women with everything
to gain and nothing to lose. The woman in the home was a natural
anti-radical. Not the police, not even the army, but the woman in the
home was the deadly enemy of the great plan.

He began to hate Elinor, not so much for herself, as for the women she
represented. She became the embodiment of possible failure. She stood in
his path, passively resistant, stubbornly brave.

She was not a clever woman, and she was slow in gathering the full
significance of a nation-wide general strike, that with an end of all
production the non-producing world would be beaten to its knees. And
then she waited for a world movement, forgetting that a flame must start
somewhere and then spread. But she listened and learned. There was a
great deal of talk about class and mass. She learned that the mass, for
instance, was hungry for a change. It would welcome any change. Woslosky
had been in Russia when the Kerensky regime was overthrown, and had seen
that strange three days when the submerged part of the city filled the
streets, singing, smiling, endlessly walking, exalted and without guile.

No problems troubled them. They had ceased to labor, and that was
enough.

Had it not been for its leaders, the mass would have risen like a tide,
and ebbed again.

Elinor had struggled to understand. This was not Socialism. Jim had been
a Socialist for years. He had believed that the gradual elevation of the
few, the gradual subjection of the many, would go on until the majority
would drag the few down to their own level. But this new dream was
something immediate. At her table she began to