on no
account to learn anything?«
    Stella shook her head, saying, »You don't know her.«
    »I should much like to,« was Mrs. Boscobel's smiling rejoinder.
    In Stella's company it did not seem very likely that Adela would lose her
social enthusiasm, yet danger there was, and that precisely on account of Mrs.
Westlake's idealist tendencies. When she spoke of the toiling multitude, she saw
them in a kind of exalted vision; she beheld them glorious in their woe,
ennobled by the tyranny under which they groaned. She had seen little if
anything of the representative proletarian, and perchance even if shi had the
momentary impression would have faded in the light of her burning soul. Now
Adela was in the very best position for understanding those faults of the
working class which are ineradicable in any one generation. She knew her
husband, knew him better than ever now that she regarded him from a distance;
she knew 'Arry Mutimer; and now she was getting to appreciate with a
thoroughness impossible hitherto, the monstrous gulf between men of that kind
and cultured human beings. She had, too, studied the children and the women of
New Wanley, and the results of such study were arranging themselves in her mind.
All unconsciously, Stella Westlake was cooling Adela's zeal with every fervid
word she uttered; Adela at times with difficulty restrained herself from crying,
»But it is a mistake! They have not these feelings you attribute to them. Such
suffering as you picture them enduring comes only of the poetry-fed soul at
issue with fate.« She could not as yet have so expressed herself, but the
knowledge was growing within her. For Adela was not by nature a social
enthusiast. When her heart leapt at Stella's chant, it was not in truth through
contagion of sympathy, but in admiration and love of the noble woman who could
thus think and speak. Adela - and who will not be thankful for it? - was, before
all things, feminine; her true enthusiasms were personal. It was a necessity of
her nature to love a human being, this or that one, not a crowd. She had been
starving, killing the self which was her value. This home on the Devon coast
received her like an earthly paradise; looking back on New Wanley, she saw it
murky and lurid; it was hard to believe that the sun ever shone there. But for
the most part, she tried to keep it altogether from her mind, tried to
dissociate her husband from his