Clementina reflected.  “I wasn’t doing much of anything at home, and I thought I might as well come with Mrs. Lander, if she wanted me so much.”  She thought in a certain way, that he was meddling with what was not his affair, but she believed that he was sincere in his zeal for the ideal life he wished her to lead, and there were some things she had heard about him that made her pity and respect him; his self-exile and his renunciation of home and country for his principles, whatever they were; she did not understand exactly.  She would not have liked never being able to go back to Middlemount, or to be cut off from all her friends as this poor young Nihilist was, and she said, now, “I didn’t expect that it was going to be anything but a visit, and I always supposed we should go back in the spring; but now Mrs. Lander is beginning to think she won’t be well enough till fall.”

“And why need you stay with her?”

“Because she’s not very well,” answered Clementina, and she smiled, a little triumphantly as well as tolerantly.

“She could hire nurses and doctors, all she wants with her money.”

“I don’t believe it would be the same thing, exactly, and what should I do if I went back?”

“Do?  Teach!  Uplift the lives about you.”

“But you say it is better for people to live simply, and not read and think so much.”

“Then labor in the fields with them.”

Clementina laughed outright.  “I guess if anyone saw me wo’king in the fields they would think I was a disgrace to the neighbahood.”

Belsky gave her a stupified glare through his spectacles.  “I cannot undertand you Americans.”

“Well, you must come ova to America, then, Mr. Belsky”—­he had asked her not to call him by his title—­“and then you would.”

“No, I could not endure the disappointment.  You have the great opportunity of the earth.  You could be equal and just, and simple and kind.  There is nothing to hinder you.  But all you try to do is to get more and more money.”

“Now, that isn’t faia, Mr. Belsky, and you know it.”

Well, then, you joke, joke—­always joke.  Like that Mr. Hinkle.  He wants to make money with his patent of a gleaner, that will take the last grain of wheat from the poor, and he wants to joke—­joke!’

Clementina said, “I won’t let you say that about Mr. Hinkle.  You don’t know him, or you wouldn’t.  If he jokes, why shouldn’t he?”

Belsky made a gesture of rejection.  “Oh, you are an American, too.”

She had not grown less American, certainly, since she had left home; even the little conformities to Europe that she practiced were traits of Americanism.  Clementina was not becoming sophisticated, but perhaps she was becoming more conventionalized.  The knowledge of good and evil in things that had all seemed indifferently good to her once, had crept upon her, and she distinguished in her actions.  She sinned as little as any young