"Do they go to church?" Ned began again.

"I never heard them say they did."

"They're not religious then?"

"What do you call religious?"

"They don't believe anything, do they?"

"I think they believe a very great deal. Far more than most people who
pretend to believe and don't," answered Nellie. There was a longer pause.
Then:

"What do they believe?"

"In Socialism."

"Socialism! Look here, Nellie! What is Socialism?"

They had passed the fig-tree avenue, turning off it by a cross path,
where a stone fountain loomed up gigantic in the gloom and where they
could hear a rushing torrent splashing. They were in the region of
gas-lamps again. Nellie walked along with a swiftness that taxed Ned to
keep abreast of her. She seemed to him to take pleasure in the wet night.
In spite of their long walking of the day before and the lateness of the
hour she had still the same springy step and upright carriage. As they
passed under the lamps he saw her face, damp with the rain, but flushed
with exercise, her eyes gleaming, her mouth open a little. He would have
liked to have taken her hand as she steadied the umbrella, walking arm in
arm with him, but he did not dare. She was not that sort of girl.

He had felt a proud sense of proprietorship in her at the Strattons'. It
had pleased him to see how they all liked her, but pleased him most of
all that she could talk as an equal with these people, to him so
brilliant and clever. The faint thought of her which had been
unconsciously with him for years began to take shape. How pleasant it
would be to be like the Strattons, to live with Nellie always, and have
friends to come and see them on a Saturday night! How a man would work
for a home like that, so full of music, so full of song, so full of
beauty, so full of the thoughts which make men like unto gods and of the
love which makes gods like unto men! Why should not this be for him as
well as for others when, as Nellie said, it really cost only what rich
people thought poverty, and far less than the workingman's share if
things were fairly divided? And why should it not be for his mates as
well as for himself? And why, most of all, why not for the wretched
dwellers in the slums of Sydney, the weary women, the puny children, the
imbruted men? For the first time in his life, he coveted such things with
a righteous covetousness, without hating those who had them, recognising
without words that to have and to appreciate suc