Thyrsis met this by attempting to broaden the girl’s social consciousness. He showed her how the waves of intelligence, beginning at the top, spread to the lowest strata of society--changing the character of all human activities, and affecting the humblest life. He showed her the capitalist system, and explained how it worked; how it reached to the savage in the remotest corner of the earth, and seized him and made him over according to its will. It was true, for instance--and not in any poetic sense, but literally and demonstrably true--that the fate of the Congo native was determined in Wall Street, and in the financial centres of London and Paris and Brussels and Berlin. The essential thing about the natives was that they represented rubber and ivory. And Delia might go there, and try to teach them and help them, but she would find that there were forces engaged in beating them down and destroying them--forces in comparison with which she was as helpless as a child. It was true of the Congo blacks, as it was true of the people of the slums, of the proletariat of the whole earth, that there was no way to help them save to overthrow the system which made of them, not human beings, but commodities, to be purchased and passed through the profit-mill, and then flung into the scrap-heap. But Thyrsis found to his pain that it was impossible to make these considerations of any real import to Delia. She understood them, she assented to them; but that did not make them count. Her impulses came from another part of her being. Her savages were naked and hungry and ignorant and miserable; and they needed to be fed and clothed, and more important yet, to be baptized and saved. She was all the more impelled to her task by the fact that all the forces of civilization were arrayed against her. The fires of martyrdom were blazing in her soul. She meant to throw herself over a precipice--and the higher the precipice, and the more jagged the rocks beneath, the greater was the thrill which the prospect brought her. Section 4. They went back to the house; as Delia had arranged to spend the night with them, and as Corydon’s headache was better, the controversy was continued far into the evening. Thyrsis took no part in it, he listened while Corydon pleaded for herself, and pictured her loneliness and despair. Delia put her arms about her. “Don’t you see, dear,” she argued--“all that is because you are without a faith! You cast out Jesus, and deny him; and so how can _I_ help you? If you believed what I do, you would not be lonely, even if you were in the heart of Africa.” “But how can I believe what isn’t _true?_” cried Corydon; and so the skeletons of theology came forth and rattled their bones once more.