"I am going to be away all day, Mrs. Doyle," she said, in her
excellent English. "I have work to do."
"Work?" said Elinor. "Isn't there work to do here?"
"I am not a house-worker. I came to help Mr. Doyle. To-day I
shall make speeches."
Elinor was playing the game carefully. "But--can you make
speeches?" she asked.
"Me? That is my work, here, in Russia, everywhere. In Russia it
is the women who speak, the men who do what the women tell them to
do. Here some day it will be the same."
Always afterwards Elinor remembered the five minutes that followed,
for Olga, standing before her, suddenly burst into impassioned
oratory. She cited the wrongs of the poor under the old regime.
She painted in glowing colors the new. She was excited, hectic,
powerful. Elinor in her chair, an aristocrat to the finger-tips,
was frightened, interested, thrilled.
Long after Olga had gone she sat there, wondering at the real
conviction, the intensity of passion, of hate and of revenge that
actuated this newest tool of Doyle's. Doyle and his associates
might be actuated by self-interest, but the real danger in the
movement lay not with the Doyles of the world, but with these
fanatic liberators.
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