Didactic fiction; Political fiction; Social problems -- Fiction
Whether or not Longman's book promised any great usefulness to humanity,
the preparing of it was of undoubted use to him. He had seen life at
close quarters, with what Mirabeau called "terrible intimacy." His heart
had grown very large there in his "operating room." As well as he could
he hid his ever ready sympathy under a surface joviality and flippancy.
There were very few people beside Mabel who realized what a
sentimentalist he was. He was a brother to Abou ben Adhem. And that love
of his fellow-men necessarily brought him into bitter revolt against
things as they are. But he had no collective sense; he loved his fellow
men individually. He had no feeling for mass movements. Intellectually
he realized the need of united activity, he believed in trade-unions
and socialism. But the sight of a crowd always made him angry. He was an
ardent apostle of the Social Revolution. But he could not work
harmoniously with an organization. So the socialists called him an
Anarchist. He did not care what he was called. But most of the
difference between his very small living expenses and his liberal income
found its way unobtrusively into some socialist or labor organization.
But for three years now Mabel Train had been the "Cause" to which he
gave his devotion.
She was also of the class of those who, never having had to work, had
volunteered in the cause of those who must. But she had done so in a
more intense, thoroughgoing, and practical way than had Longman. She had
given not only what money she could spare, but herself.
She was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, and having come under
the influence of the able and daring group of economists on that faculty
had been educated to a position in labor matters which is very nearly as
radical as that of the socialists. One of her professors had told her
that in all his experience in coeducation he had never encountered a
woman with a more masculine brain. At the time she had felt
complimented. She had, at twenty, been proud that she did not have
hysterics, that her mind did not have "fainting fits," that she could
tackle the problems of the class-room in the same graceless, uninspired,
direct way that men did. At twenty-seven she was beginning to realize
that life was not a class-room exercise and that there were certain
inevitable problems of womanhood which could not be solved man-fashion.
She felt herself cold in comparison to other women. The romances of the
girls in college had rather disgusted her. At twenty-seven she would
have given her right hand for the ability to lose her head like some of
the shop-girls among whom she worked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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