There was universal sympathy with the Mallorings.  If a model landlord like Malloring had trouble with his people, who—­who should be immune?  Arson!  It was the last word!  Felix, who secretly shared Nedda’s horror of the insensate cruelty of flames, listened, nevertheless, to the jubilation that they had caught the fellow, with profound disturbance.  For the memory of the big laborer seated against the wall, his eyes haunting round his cell, quarrelled fiercely with his natural abhorrence of any kind of violence, and his equally natural dislike of what brought anxiety into his own life—­and the life, almost as precious, of his little daughter.  Scarcely a word of the evening’s conversation but gave him in high degree the feeling:  How glib all this is, how far from reality!  How fatted up with shell after shell of comfort and security!  What do these people know, what do they realize, of the pressure and beat of raw life that lies behind—­what do even I, who have seen this prisoner, know?  For us it’s as simple as killing a rat that eats our corn, or a flea that sucks our blood.  Arson!  Destructive brute—­lock him up!  And something in Felix said:  For order, for security, this may be necessary.  But something also said:  Our smug attitude is odious!

He watched his little daughter closely, and several times marked the color rush up in her face, and once could have sworn he saw tears in her eyes.  If the temper of this talk were trying to him, hardened at a hundred dinner-tables, what must it be to a young and ardent creature!  And he was relieved to find, on getting to the drawing-room, that she had slipped behind the piano and was chatting quietly with her Uncle John. . . .

As to whether this or that man liked her, Nedda perhaps was not more ignorant than other women; and she had noted a certain warmth and twinkle in Uncle John’s eyes the other evening, a certain rather jolly tendency to look at her when he should have been looking at the person to whom he was talking; so that she felt toward him a trustful kindliness not altogether unmingled with a sense that he was in that Office which controls the destinies of those who ‘get into trouble.’  The motives even of statesmen, they say, are mixed; how much more so, then, of girls in love!  Tucked away behind a Steinway, which instinct told her was not for use, she looked up under her lashes at her uncle’s still military figure and said softly: 

“It was awfully good of you to come, too, Uncle John.”

And John, gazing down at that round, dark head, and those slim, pretty, white shoulders, answered: 

“Not at all—­very glad to get a breath of fresh air.”

And he stealthily tightened his white waistcoat—­a rite neglected of late; the garment seemed to him at the moment unnecessarily loose.

“You have so much experience, Uncle.  Do you think violent rebellion is ever justifiable?”

“I do not.”