They had had a scene to-night, apropos of her visit to the garden-concert. She had gone with an ornate and expensive person, a sporting gentleman, whose ostentatious affluence had won her fancy; and whom James detested. She called him one of her “gentleman-friends;” and they had angry words about him, for I suspect, after all, James was a better judge of a gentleman than his father had been. But she had his own cleverness and strength of will; and it was difficult for James, who despised all authority himself, to exercise it upon another. Both brother and sister were, and had always been, absolutely and utterly devoid of any semblance or savor of religion; how absolutely, only those who have lived in certain classes of society in modern American manufacturing towns can know; and there was a large range of motive upon which it was perfectly hopeless for the brother to call. He knew it, and he was too bluntly honest not to recognize it; so he ended merely by hoping that his sister would not make a d----d fool of herself; which as they both had common-sense and practical minds, was perhaps the best argument he could use. But Jenny, perfectly conscious of her ability to take care of herself, was quite well aware of all that could be said on both sides; and replied that if Jim chose to smoke pipes in his shirt-sleeves with common laborers, there was no reason why his sister should not accept a gentleman’s invitation to go to a concert. An English navvy might have stopped her going with a knock-down argument; but no pure-blooded American ever strikes a woman, and James could only swallow his wrath, admitting that his sister was a free human being in a free country, and if she preferred pleasure and he power, why it was the way of humanity. He was conscious that his own aims were selfish enough, and though he dimly felt that jewellery and fashionable hats and shawls were vanities, it was hard to put that idea into their language. For he believed in labor and commodities; and these, at least, were commodities. What fault he found was in their distribution alone; and his sister was but taking her way to get them unto herself. But to see her aping aristocracy added a drop to the hate he bore that _bête noire_ of his class; though surely Dave St. Clair was no aristocrat, as he had to admit. Dave St. Clair was the gentleman who had taken his sister to the garden. What was it, then, that made him hate the world? It was money, accumulation, capital, as he had learned to call the word. And he went back to the little coterie in the back room, and fervidly resumed his speech where his sister’s departure had interrupted it.