Suddenly Nellie let go the umbrella, leaving it in his hand. She bent
forward, stooped down. The strong young face, proud and sad, so pure in
its maiden strength, glowing with passionate emotion, was laid softly
against that bruised and battered figurehead of shipwrecked womanhood;
Nellie had kissed the sleeping harlot on the cheek.

Then, standing erect, she turned to Ned, her lips parted, her face
quivering, her eyes flashing, her hand resting gently on the unconscious
woman.

"You want to know what Socialism is," she said, in a low, trembling
voice. "This is Socialism." And bending down again she kissed the poor
outcast harlot a second time. The woman never stirred. Seizing Ned's arm
Nellie drew him away, breaking into a pace that made him respect her
prowess as a walker ever after.

Until they reached home neither spoke. Nellie looked sterner than ever.
Ned was in a whirl of mental excitement. Perhaps if he had been less
natural himself the girl's passionate declaration of fellowship with all
who are wronged and oppressed--for so he interpreted it by the light of
his own thoughts--might have struck him as a little bit stagey. Being
natural, he took it for what it was, an outburst of genuine feeling. But
if Nellie had really designed it she could not have influenced him more
deeply. Their instincts, much akin, had reached the same idea by
different ways. Her spontaneous expression of feeling had fitted in her
mind to the Cause which possessed her as a religious idea, and had capped
in him the human yearnings which were leading him to the same goal. And
so, what with his overflowing sympathy for the sleeping outcast, and his
swelling love for Nellie, and the chaotic excitement roused in him by all
he had seen and heard during the preceding hours, that kiss burnt itself
into his imagination and became to him all his life through as a sacred
symbol. From that moment his life was forecast--a woman tempted him and
he ate.

For that kiss Ned gave himself into the hands of a fanaticism, eating of
the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, striving to become as a god knowing
good from evil. For that kiss he became one of those who have the Desire
which they know can never be satiated in them. For that kiss he
surrendered himself wholly to the faith of her whose face was sad and
stern-mouthed, content ever after if with his whole life he could fill
one of the ruts that delay the coming of Liberty's triumphal car. To that
turn