nviction is that the upper class can produce a Brook
Farm, but nothing more. The religious movement of the future will want
a vast effusion of feeling and passion to carry it into action, and
feeling and passion are only to be generated in sufficient volume among
the masses, where the vested interests of all kinds are less tremendous.
You upper-class folk have your part, of course. Woe betide you if you
shirk--but----'

'Oh, let us leave it alone,' she said with a little shrug. 'I knew you
would give us all the work and refuse us all the profits. We are
to starve for your workman, to give him our hearts and purses and
everything we have, not that we may hoodwink him--which might be worth
doing--but that he may rule us. It is too much!'

'Very well,' he said dryly, his color rising. 'Very well, let it be too
much.'

And, dropping his lounging attitude, he stood erect, and she saw that he
meant to be going. Her look swept over him from head to foot--over the
worn face with its look of sensitive refinement and spiritual force, the
active frame, the delicate but most characteristic hand. Never had any
man so attracted her for years; never had she found it so difficult to
gain a hold. Eugenie de Netteville, _poseuse_, schemer, woman of the
world that she was, was losing command of herself.

'What did you really mean by "worldliness" and the "world" in your
lecture last Sunday?' she asked him suddenly, with a little accent of
scorn. 'I thought your diatribes absurd. What you religious people call
the "world" is really only the average opinion of sensible people which
neither you nor your kind could do without for a day.'

He smiled, half amused by her provocative tone, and defended himself not
very seriously. But she threw all her strength into the argument, and
he forgot that he had meant to go at once. When she chose she could
talk admirably, and she chose now. She had the most aggressive ways of
attacking, and then, in the same breath, the most subtle and softening
ways of yielding and, as it were, of asking pardon. Directly her
antagonist turned upon her he found himself disarmed he knew not how.
The disputant disappeared, and he felt the woman, restless, melancholy,
sympathetic, hungry for friendship and esteem, yet too proud to make
any direct bid for either. It was impossible not to be interested and
touched.

Such at least was the woman whom Robert Elsmere felt. Whether in his
hours of intimacy with her twelve