"That's a fine idea of a liberal education." Mabel snorted. "She isn't going to be a Socialist spellbinder. Her job's with the unions. The Webbs' _Industrial Democracy_ would help her a lot more than your Socialist tracts." "It's just as iniquitous to sweat her intellect as her body," Longman groaned. "Can't you two blithering idiots realize that before you read any of these books you read hundreds of others, studied for years? I hope she won't specialize--in her study--on Socialism or trade-unions, either, for several years. She needs to keep her mind open and absorb a background. She ought to read Westermarck's _History of Human Marriage_ before she tackles Bebel's _Woman_. She ought to read Lecky and Gibbon and John Fiske and Michelet and a lot of astronomy and geology and physics and biology--a person's an ignoramus to-day who hasn't a broad knowledge of biology--and she ought to know something about psychology before she tackles the Webbs. She ought to put in some time on pure literature. You people are thinking about Yetta Rayefsky, the labor organizer of the next few years. Well, I hope she's going to live still three score years and more than ten. It's going to do her more good to read Marcus Aurelius than Marx and Engels. She wants to know something of the traditions of the race, the great men of the past, Homer and Shakespeare and Rabelais and Swift. And above all she needs to know the ideas of our own times, Ibsen and Tolstoi, Shaw and Anatole France. She'll pick up the Socialist and trade-union dope as she goes along. It's the background we, her friends, can give her." And so for an hour or more they squabbled over a large sheet of paper and at last evolved a course of reading for her. There were to be two mornings a week to natural science, two to history, two to social science and psychology, and one to literature. Yetta sat back and listened to it all, very much impressed by the way these three intellectual giants hurled at each other's heads the titles of books of which she had never heard. There was indeed very much for her to learn. Mabel generally concurred in Walter's suggestions, but Isadore doggedly insisted that more Socialist matter should be included. He was especially rabid on the question of history. "What's the use of learning a lot of rot you've got to unlearn? Why read Michelet and Carlyle on the French Revolution? These old idealists did the best they knew how. Carlyle really thought Mirabeau made the Revolution and Michelet thought it was Danton. But nobody, not even the antisocialists, believes in the 'great man theory' any more. All our history has got to be rewritten from the modern point of view. It hasn't been done yet, and the only way to get things straight is to saturate yourself in the social idea, get it into your head that this is a world of economic classes, not individuals, then you can read anything without danger--you know how to discount it.