Mr. Stenson turned to Julian.
"Will you go on with Miss Abbeway?" he begged. "I will catch up
with you on the marshes. I want to have just a word with Furley."
Julian and his companion crossed the country road and passed
through the gate opposite on to the rude track which led down
almost to the sea.
"You are very interested in English labour questions, Miss
Abbeway," he remarked, "considering that you are only half an
Englishwoman."
"It isn't only the English labouring classes in whom I am
interested," she replied impatiently. "It is the cause of the
people throughout the whole of the world which in my small way I
preach."
"Your own country," he continued, a little diffidently, "is
scarcely a good advertisement for the cause of social reform."
Her tone trembled with indignation as she answered him.
"My own country," she said, "has suffered for so many centuries
from such terrible oppression that the reaction was bound, in its
first stages, to produce nothing but chaos. Automatically, all
that seems to you unreasonable, wicked even, in a way, horrible--
will in the course of time disappear. Russia will find herself.
In twenty years' time her democracy will have solved the great
problem, and Russia be the foremost republic of the world."
"Meanwhile," he remarked, "she is letting us down pretty badly."
"But you are selfish, you English!" she exclaimed. "You see one
of the greatest nations in the world going through its hour of
agony, and you think nothing but how you yourselves will be
affected! Every thinking person in Russia regrets that this thing
should have come to pass at such a time.
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