.

"If it is possible for the workingman to rise under a capitalistic
system, why do you not rise, then? Why do I not rise? I'm as good as
Ditmar, I'm better educated, but we're all slaves. What right has a man
to make you and me work for him just because he has capital?"

"Why, the right of capital," Edward would reply.

Mr. Shivers, with the manner of one dealing with an incurable
romanticism and sentimentality, would lift his hands in despair. And in
spite of the fact that Janet detested him, he sometimes exercised
over her a paradoxical fascination, suggesting as he did unexplored
intellectual realms. She despised her father for not being able to crush
the little man. Edward would make pathetic attempts to capture the role
Shivers had appropriated, to be the practical party himself, to convict
Shivers of idealism. Socialism scandalized him, outraged, even more than
atheism, something within him he held sacred, and he was greatly annoyed
because he was unable adequately to express this feeling.

"You can't change human nature, Mr. Shivers," Edward would insist in his
precise but ineffectual manner. "We all want property, you would accept
a fortune if it was offered to you, and so should I. Americans will
never become socialists."

"But look at me, wasn't I born in Meriden, Connecticut? Ain't that
Yankee enough for you?" Thus Mr. Shivers sought blandly to confound him.

A Yankee Shades of the Pilgrim fathers, of seven, generations of
Bumpuses! A Yankee who used his hands in that way, a Yankee with a nose
like that, a Yankee with a bald swathe down the middle of his crown and
bunches of black, moth-eaten hair on either side! But Edward, too polite
to descend to personalities, was silent....

In brief, this very politeness of Edward's, which his ancestors would
have scorned, this consideration and lack of self-assertion made him the
favourite prey of the many "characters" in Fillmore Street whose sanity
had been disturbed by pressure from above, in whose systems had lodged
the germs of those exotic social doctrines floating so freely in the
air of our modern industrial communities.... Chester Glenn remains for
a passing mention. A Yankee of Yankees, this, born on a New Hampshire
farm, and to the ordinary traveller on the Wigmore branch of the
railroad just a good-natured, round-faced, tobacco-chewing brakeman who
would take a seat beside ladies of his acquaintance aid make himself
agreeable until it was time to r