at
interest to transcribe. But did she really understand? To test her, he
said:
"What do you think of it?"
"That it's wicked," replied she, without hesitation and in her small,
quiet voice.
He laughed. In a way this girl, sitting there--this inconsequential and
negligible atom--typefied the masses of mankind against whom that secret
agreement was directed. They, the feeble and powerless ones, with their
necks ever bent under the yoke of the mighty and their feet ever
stumbling into the traps of the crafty--they, too, would utter an
impotent "Wicked!" if they knew. His voice had the note of gentle
raillery in it as he said:
"No--not wicked. Just business."
She was looking down at her book, her face expressionless. A few moments
before he would have said it was an empty face. Now it seemed to him
sphynxlike.
"Just business," he repeated. "It is going to take money from those who
don't know how to keep or to spend it and give it to those who do know
how. The money will go for building up civilization, instead of for beer
and for bargain-trough finery to make working men's wives and daughters
look cheap and nasty."
She was silent.
"Now, do you understand?"
"I understand what you said." She looked at him as she spoke. He
wondered how he could have fancied those lack-luster eyes beautiful or
capable of expression.
"You don't believe it?" he asked.
"No," said she. And suddenly in those eyes, gazing now into space, there
came the unutterably melancholy look--heavy-lidded from heartache,
weary-wise from long, long and bitter, experiences. Yet she still looked
young--girlishly young--but it was the youthful look the classic Greek
sculptors tried to give their young goddesses--the youth without
beginning or end--younger than a baby's, older than the oldest of the
sons of men. He mocked himself for the fancies this queer creature
inspired in him; but she none the less made him uneasy.
"You don't believe it?" he repeated.
"No," she answered again. "My father has taught me--some things."
He drummed impatiently on the table. He resented her impertinence--for,
like all men of clear and positive mind, he regarded contradiction as in
one aspect impudent, in another aspect evidence of the folly of his
contradictor. Then he gave a short laugh--the confessing laugh of the
clever man who has tried to believe his own sophistries and has failed.
"Well--neither do I believe it," said he. "Now, to get the thing
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