She suddenly calmed down; and this occurred in a striking manner immediately after she became acquainted with another lady who also, though for other reasons, wished to join our expedition. This other lady was my sister Clara. While the former was prompted to go to Africa by her zeal for our principles, the latter was fired with the same desire by detestation and dread of those same principles. My sister (twelve years my senior, and still unmarried, because she had not been able to find a man who satisfied her ideal of personal distinction and lofty character) was one of the best--in her inmost heart one of the noblest--of women, but full of immovable prejudices with which I had been continually coming into contact for the twenty-six years of my life. She was not cold-hearted--her hand was always open to those who needed help; but she had an invincible contempt for everything that did not belong to the so-called higher, cultured classes. When for the first time the social question was explained to her by me, she was seized with horror at the idea that reasonable men should believe that she and her kitchen maid were endowed with equal rights by nature. Finding that all efforts to convert her were in vain, I long refrained from telling her anything of my relations with Dr. Strahl, or of the, founding of the Free Society and the _rôle_ which I played in it. I wished to spare her as long as possible the sorrow of knowing of my going astray; for I love this sister dearly, and am idolised by her in return. For many long years the one passion of her life was her anxious solicitude about me. We lived together, and she always treated me as a small boy whose bringing up was her business. That I could exist more than at most two or three days away from her protection, without becoming the victim of my childish inexperience and of the wickedness of evil men, always seemed to her an utter impossibility. Imagine, then, the unutterable terror of my protectress when I was eventually compelled to disclose to her not only that I was a member of a socialistic society, had not only devoted the whole of my modest fortune to the objects of that society, but had actually been selected as leader of 200 Socialists into the interior of Africa! It was some days before she could grasp and believe the monstrous fact; then followed entreaties, tears, desperate reproaches, and expostulations. I might let the fellows have my money--over which, however, she felt that she should have kept better guard--but, for heaven's sake, could I not stay like an honest man at home? She consulted our family physician as to my responsibility for my actions; but she came back worse than she went, for he was one of our Society--indeed, a member of the expedition. At last, when all else had failed, she announced that, if I persisted in rushing to my ruin, she would accompany me. When I explained to her that this could not be, as there were to be no women in the expedition, she brought her