He was also curious to see several of those "interiors" he had read so much about, and hoped his pupils would meet in turn at their different homes. He was a sincere and honest socialist, was Mr. Kirkpatrick, and he had a good healthy class-consciousness and class-hatred. But he also had a large measure of intelligent curiosity. He had never expected to have the opportunity to gratify it in respect to "bourgeois" inner circles, and when it came he had only hesitated long enough to search his soul and assure himself that he was in no danger of growing compliant and soft. Moreover he might possibly make converts, and in any case it was not a bad way, society being still what it was, of turning an honest penny. But in this the first lesson he was as disconcerted as a socialist serene in his faith could be. The three girls had curved their slender bodies forward, resting one elbow on a knee. At the end of each of these feline arches was a pair of fixed and glowing eyes. No doubt there were faces also, but he was only vaguely aware of three white disks from which flowed forth lambent streams of concentrated light. They looked like three little sea-monsters, slim, flexible, malignant, ready to spring. He exaggerated in his embarrassment, but he was not so very far wrong. "The little devils!" he thought in his righteous wrath. "I'll teach 'em, all right." As it was necessary to break the farcical silence he said in a voice too loud for the small library. "Well, what is it about socialism that you don't just know? Mrs. Dwight told me you had read some." "There is one thing I want to say before we begin," said Aileen in her high light impertinent voice, "and that is that if there is one thing that makes us more angry than another it is to be called _bourgeois_." "And ain't you?" "We are not. I suppose your Marx didn't know the difference, although he is said to have married well, but _bourgeois_ for centuries in Europe had meant middle-class. Just that and nothing more. Marx had no right to pervert an honest historic old word into something so different and so obnoxious." "To Marx all capitalists were in the same class. I suppose what you mean is that you society folks call yourselves aristocrats, even when you have less capital than some of them that can't get in." "Sure thing. Take it from me." He gazed at her astounded, and once more had recourse to his rather heavy sarcasm. "Even when they use slang." "Oh, we're never afraid to--like lots of the middle-class--bourgeois. Too sure of ourselves to care a hang what any one thinks of us."