for the United States
Senate, but she doubted if she ought to sit by when it was railed at as
a rich man's club. It shocked her to be told that the rich and poor were
not equal before the law in a country where justice must be paid for at
every step in fees and costs, or where a poor man must go to war in his
own person, and a rich man might hire someone to go in his. Mrs. March
felt that this rebellious mind in Lindau really somehow outlawed him
from sympathy, and retroactively undid his past suffering for the
country: she had always particularly valued that provision of the law,
because in forecasting all the possible mischances that might befall her
own son, she had been comforted by the thought that if there ever
was another war, and Tom were drafted, his father could buy him a
substitute. Compared with such blasphemy as this, Lindau's declaration
that there was not equality of opportunity in America, and that
fully one-half the people were debarred their right to the pursuit of
happiness by the hopeless conditions of their lives, was flattering
praise. She could not listen to such things in silence, though, and
it did not help matters when Lindau met her arguments with facts and
reasons which she felt she was merely not sufficiently instructed to
combat, and he was not quite gentlemanly to urge. "I am afraid for
the effect on the children," she said to her husband. "Such perfectly
distorted ideas--Tom will be ruined by them."

"Oh, let Tom find out where they're false," said March. "It will be good
exercise for his faculties of research. At any rate, those things are
getting said nowadays; he'll have to hear them sooner or later."

"Had he better hear them at home?" demanded his wife.

"Why, you know, as you're here to refute them, Isabel," he teased,
"perhaps it's the best place. But don't mind poor old Lindau, my dear.
He says himself that his parg is worse than his pidte, you know."

"Ah, it's too late now to mind him," she sighed. In a moment of rash
good feeling, or perhaps an exalted conception of duty, she had herself
proposed that Lindau should come every week and read German with Tom;
and it had become a question first how they could get him to take pay
for it, and then how they could get him to stop it. Mrs. March never
ceased to wonder at herself for having brought this about, for she had
warned her husband against making any engagement with Lindau which would
bring him regularly to the house: the Ge