Joost stared in amazement. "Do you call that not unpleasant?" he said.
"It is the most grievous, the most pitiable thing in all the world."

"For the aristocrats, yes," Julia agreed; "but for the others? Can you
not imagine how they must have revelled in it?"

Joost could not; he could not imagine anything violent or terrible,
and Julia went on to ask him another question, which, however, she
answered herself.

"Do you know why the women of the people did it? It was not only because
the others had food and they had not; I think it was more because the
aristocrats had a thousand other things that they had not, and could
never have--feelings, instincts, pleasures, traditions--which they could
not have had or enjoyed even if they had been put in palaces and dressed
like queens. It was the fact that they could never, never rise to them,
that helped to make them so furious to pull all down."

There was a sincerity of conviction in her tone, but Joost only said,
"You cannot enjoy to think of such things; it is horrible and
pitiable to remember that human creatures became so like beasts."

Julia's mood altered. "Pitiable, yes; perhaps you are right. After
all, we are pitiful creatures, and, under the thin veneer, like enough
to the beasts." Then she changed the subject abruptly, and began to
talk of his flowers.

But he was not satisfied with the change; instinctively he felt she
was talking to his level. "Why do you always speak to me of bulbs and
plants?" he said. "Do you think I am interested in nothing else?"