“Yes, tell me!” she whispered.  “I don’t understand.  I can’t!  It—­it all seems so horrible, so unreal, so—­so different from what I’ve always believed about the majesty and purity of the law!  Can these things be, indeed?”

He laughed bitterly.

“Can they?” he repeated.  “When you see that they are, isn’t that answer enough?  And the reason of it all is that I’m a Socialist and know certain secrets of certain men, which—­if I should tell the world—­might, nay, surely would precipitate a revolution.  So, these men, and the System behind them, have tried to discredit me by this foul charge.  After this, if the charge sticks, I may shout my head off, exposing what I know; and who will listen?  You know the answer as well as I!  Do I complain?  No, not once!  What I must suffer, for this wondrous Cause, is not a tenth what thousands suffer every day, in silence and high courage.  What has happened to me, personally, is but the merest trifle beside what has already happened to thousands, fighting for life and liberty, for wife and home and children; for the right to work and live like men, not beasts!”

“You mean the—­the working class?” she ventured, wonderingly.  “Is this outrage really a minor one, compared with what they, who feed and warm and carry the whole world, have to suffer?  Tell me, for I—­God help me, I am ignorant!  I am beginning to see, to half-see, awful, dim, ghostly shapes of huge, unspeakable wrongs.  Tell me the truth about all this, as you have told it about yourself—­and let me know!”

Then Gabriel talked as never he had talked before.  To this, his audience of one, there in the dirty and ill-smelling police station, he unfolded the sad tale of the disinherited, the enslaved, the wretched, as never to a huge, and spell-bound audience in hall or park or city street.  His eloquence, always convincing, now became sublime.

With master strokes he painted vast outlines of the whole sad picture—­the System based on robbery and fraud and exploitation; its natural results in millionaire and tramp and harlot and degenerate; the crime of armies of unemployed and starving men, of millions of women forced into the factories and shops, there to compete with men and lower wages and lose their finest feminine attributes in the sordid and heartless drudging for a pittance.

He told her of child slavery, and brought before her eyes the pictures he himself had seen, of the pale, stunted little victims of Mammon’s greed, toiling by day and night in stifling, dangerous mines; in the Hell-glare of the glass-factories; in the hand-bruising, soul-obliterating Inferno of the coal-breakers; in the hot, linty, sickening atmosphere of the southern cotton-mills.  And as he talked, she saw for the first time the figures of these bowed and bloodless little boys and girls, giving their lives drop by drop, and cough by cough, that she might have purple and fine linen and the rich, soft, easy paths of life.