Overman had appeared on the scene of Kate’s life in a peculiar crisis. Married two years, she had passed through the period of love’s ecstacy which woman finds first in self-surrender. She had just reached the point of sex growth when a revolt against man’s dominion became inevitable.

This mood of revolt was made stronger by Gordon’s fret over her social gatherings. In the dim light of the pulpit, preaching with mystic elation, he had seemed to her a god. Now, in the full blaze of physical possession, the divine glow had paled about his brow. She had found him only a man, self-conscious, egotistic and domineering. He had many personal habits she did not like. He was overfastidious in his dress, and critical and fussy about her lack of order in housekeeping. He was finicky about his food. He hated tea, declaring the odour made him sick. She felt this a covert thrust at her five-o’clocks.

To his criticisms she at last coolly replied:

“I claim the perfect freedom you preach. I will do as I please. You can do the same.”

He laughed in a weak sort of way and declared he liked her independence.

At this moment of reaction, satiety, and the beginning of friction he had introduced her to Overman. His candour, his brutal realism, his defiance and scorn for poetic theories, presented to her the sharp contrast which made him doubly fascinating. Just at the moment Gordon was growing peevishly dogmatic in the reiteration of his ideals, she had suffered a physical disillusioning and begun to tire of poetry.

The sheer brute power of the other man, the incarnation of the thing that is, with a cynic’s contempt for dreams and dreamers, had given voice to her own rebellion and drawn her resistlessly.

The boyish tenderness underlying Overman’s nature, which she discovered later, had made his ugliness and brute strength added charms.

He had a pathetic way of looking at her with a doglike worship, as though conscious of his defects, which pleased and nattered her own sense of the perfection of beauty.

They were seated in his box at the Metropolitan Opera House while Gordon was at the farewell banquet to his foreign delegates.

“I feel,” he said, bitterly, “every time I see this play of ‘Faust,’ and hear Edouard De Reszke’s deep bass speak for His Majesty the Devil, that His Majesty really made this world. I’d know it but for the paradox of such divine perfection before my eyes in the living reality of a woman like you.”

His voice throbbed with earnestness.

“I’m growing to love the world. It’s a beautiful old place,” she answered, with a lazy smile.

“Well, it’s the only one I’m likely to travel in, so I’m going to make the best of it, work with its mighty forces, dare and defy the fools who cross my purposes. If the future has for me only pain, I’ll not complain. I’ll grin and bear it, but I’ll confess to you I get a little lonely sometimes.”

Her eyes lifted with surprise.

“I never heard you admit that before.”

“No; and what’s more, no one else ever did or ever will.”

He looked at her pathetically, and a deeper colour flooded her cheeks.

When they reached home Gordon had just returned from the banquet and was bubbling over with enthusiasm.

“Mark, we have had a grand time to-night—organised a movement that will put out a sign ‘To Let’ on every den of thieves in Wall Street.”

“What? Founded another church already?”

“A new Brotherhood within the Church Universal.”

Overman shrugged his shoulders.

“Talk plain English. What will be its name at Police Headquarters?”

Gordon smilingly and proudly replied, “The Federated Democracy of the World.”

“H’m; what are you going to do? Federate the hobos of all tongues and demand better straw in empty freight cars and shorter stops at sidings for express trains to pass?”

“Our purpose will be to inaugurate the Cooperative Commonwealth of Man. The movement will bring into harmonious action the insurgent forces of the world. Within ten years an earthquake will shake the social fabric. Within twenty years profound political and social revolutions will lift the human race over centuries of plodding into a new world of real liberty, equality, and fraternity.”

Overman growled cynically.

“That has a French accent. I hear there are fifty thousand active Socialists in France divided into exactly fifty thousand factions. Which division of this grand army will lead the movement in Gaul?”

Gordon ignored his interruption, and his voice thrilled with passionate eloquence.

“We have abolished crowns and scepters. It is a moral and physical absurdity that, in a democracy, a whiskered babe, whose labour value to society is just ten dollars a week, should inherit millions of dollars that give him the power over men more terrible, absolute and irresponsible than a Caesar ever wielded over the empire of the world. No wonder our papers shiver when these babes sneeze, and report their daily life with servile pride.”

“And would the oil of anointment of your new king, the walking delegate, be strong enough to temper the onion in his breath? I’d like to know that before drawing too near the throne.” The banker’s mouth twisted into a sneer with the last word.

“This new Democracy will itself be the highest nobility, an ethical aristocracy, and when it comes the Kingdom of Heaven will be at hand.”

The one eye glanced quickly at the speaker and blinked.

“Let me know before it gets here,” said Overman, a reminiscent look overspreading his rugged face, while Kate leaned closer with eager interest.

“Why?”

“Because I’m going somewhere. When I was a boy I had to go to church. Our old preacher faithfully urged us for hours at a time to get ready for heaven, a glorious place away up in space where all wore crowns and there wasn’t a Democrat in town, everybody played psalms on big gold harps, and every day was Sunday. I early learned to hate heaven and look on hell as my only home. Now you come along, rub hell off the map, and threaten me with a heaven here on earth worse than the old one. Hell would be a summer resort to this thing you’ve conjured up. If it comes, I’ll get off the earth.”

“Get your flying machine ready.”

“Oh, ten cents’ worth of ‘rough on rats’ will do me.”

Gordon shook his head thoughtfully.

“It’s a strange thing to me you conservatives are blind to the coming of this revolution. It will be the grimmest joke Fate ever played on the pride of man. Within the generation now living a Cooperative Commonwealth will supplant the whole system of slave wages.”

The banker suddenly straightened his massive neck and his eye flashed.

“You mean establish a system of universal slavery. Suppose under your maudlin cry of brotherhood you set up your fool’s paradise, where would reside the authority of your Commonwealth?”

“In the State, of course.”

“And who would be the ............