She had come prepared to upbraid and to outrage this
patrician with every jibe and grossness camp usage could supply
her with, and--she stood dumb before her! She could only feel an
all-absorbing sense of being ridiculous, and contemptible, and puerile
in her sight.
"You bring two charges against me," said Venetia, when she had vainly
awaited answer. "That I treat your comrades like paupers, and that I rob
the people--my own people, I imagine you to mean--of their dues. In the
first, how will you prove it?--in the second, how can you know it?"
"Pardieu, Milady!" swore Cigarette recklessly, seeking only to hold her
own against the new sense of inferiority and of inability that oppressed
her. "I was in the hospital when your fruits and your wines came; and as
for your people, I don't speak of them,--they are all slaves, they say,
in Albion, and will bear to be yoked like oxen if they think they can
turn any gold in the furrows--I speak of the people. Of the toiling,
weary, agonized, joyless, hapless multitudes who labor on, and on, and
on, ever in darkness, that such as you may bask in sunlight and take
your pleasures wrung out of the death-sweat of millions of work-murdered
poor! What right have you to have your path strewn with roses, and every
pain spared from you; only to lift your voice and say, 'Let that be
done,' to see it done?--to find life one long, sweet summer day of
gladness and abundance, while they die out in agony by thousands,
ague-stricken, famine-stricken, crime-stricken, age-stricken, for want
only of one ray of the light of happiness that falls from dawn to dawn
like gold upon your head?"
Vehement and exaggerated as the upbraiding was, her hearer's face grew
very grave, very thoughtful, as she spoke, those luminous, earnest eyes,
whose power even the young democrat felt, gazed wearily down into hers.
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