t wish to lend you a hand for the one you
gave us all." March felt this to be a fine turn, and his voice trembled
slightly in saying it.

Lindau smiled grimly. "You think zo? I wouldn't moch like to drost 'em.
I've driedt idt too often." He began to speak German again fiercely:
"Besides, they owe me nothing. Do you think I knowingly gave my hand
to save this oligarchy of traders and tricksters, this aristocracy
of railroad wreckers and stock gamblers and mine-slave drivers and
mill-serf owners? No; I gave it to the slave; the slave--ha! ha!
ha!--whom I helped to unshackle to the common liberty of hunger and
cold. And you think I would be the beneficiary of such a state of
things?"

"I'm sorry to hear you talk so, Lindau," said March; "very sorry." He
stopped with a look of pain, and rose to go. Lindau suddenly broke into
a laugh and into English.

"Oh, well, it is only dalk, Passil, and it toes me goodt. My parg is
worse than my pidte, I cuess. I pring these things roundt bretty soon.
Good-bye, Passil, my tear poy. Auf wiedersehen!"

XIII.

March went away thinking of what Lindau had said, but not for the
impersonal significance of his words so much as for the light they
cast upon Lindau himself. He thought the words violent enough, but
in connection with what he remembered of the cheery, poetic, hopeful
idealist, they were even more curious than lamentable. In his own life
of comfortable reverie he had never heard any one talk so before, but he
had read something of the kind now and then in blatant labor newspapers
which he had accidentally fallen in with, and once at a strikers'
meeting he had heard rich people denounced with the same frenzy. He had
made his own reflections upon the tastelessness of the rhetoric, and
the obvious buncombe of the motive, and he had not taken the matter
seriously.

He could not doubt Lindau's sincerity, and he wondered how he came to
that way of thinking. From his experience of himself he accounted for
a prevailing literary quality in it; he decided it to be from Lindau's
reading and feeling rather than his reflection. That was the notion he
formed of some things he had met with in Ruskin to much the same effect;
he regarded them with amusement as the chimeras of a rhetorician run
away with by his phrases.

But as to Lindau, the chief thing in his mind was a conception of the
droll irony of a situation in which so fervid a hater of millionaires
should be working, indirect