But in this the first lesson he was as disconcerted as a socialist serene
in his faith could be.
The three girls had curved their slender bodies forward, resting one elbow
on a knee. At the end of each of these feline arches was a pair of fixed
and glowing eyes. No doubt there were faces also, but he was only vaguely
aware of three white disks from which flowed forth lambent streams of
concentrated light. They looked like three little sea-monsters, slim,
flexible, malignant, ready to spring.
He exaggerated in his embarrassment, but he was not so very far wrong.
"The little devils!" he thought in his righteous wrath. "I'll teach 'em,
all right."
As it was necessary to break the farcical silence he said in a voice too
loud for the small library. "Well, what is it about socialism that you
don't just know? Mrs. Dwight told me you had read some."
"There is one thing I want to say before we begin," said Aileen in her high
light impertinent voice, "and that is that if there is one thing that makes
us more angry than another it is to be called _bourgeois_."
"And ain't you?"
"We are not. I suppose your Marx didn't know the difference, although he
is said to have married well, but _bourgeois_ for centuries in Europe
had meant middle-class. Just that and nothing more. Marx had no right to
pervert an honest historic old word into something so different and so
obnoxious.
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