Squatting on the lowest step, his face upturned, by the light of the arc
sputtering above the street he looked like a yellow frog, his eager eyes
directed toward Janet, whom he suspected of intelligence.

"If there was a God, a nice, kind, all-powerful God, would he permit what
happened in one of the loom-rooms last week? A Polak girl gets her hair
caught in the belt pfff!" He had a marvellously realistic gift when it
came to horrors: Janet felt her hair coming out by the roots. Although
she never went to church, she did not like to think that no God existed.
Of this Mr. Shivers was very positive. Edward, too, listened uneasily,
hemmed and hawed, making ineffectual attempts to combat Mr. Shivers's
socialism with a deeply-rooted native individualism that Shivers declared
as defunct as Christianity.

"If it is possible for the workingman to rise under a capitalistic
system, why do you not rise, then? Why do I not rise? I'm as good as
Ditmar, I'm better educated, but we're all slaves. What right has a man
to make you and me work for him just because he has capital?"

"Why, the right of capital," Edward would reply.

Mr. Shivers, with the manner of one dealing with an incurable romanticism
and sentimentality, would lift his hands in despair. And in spite of the
fact that Janet detested him, he sometimes exercised over her a
paradoxical fascination, suggesting as he did unexplored intellectual
realms. She despised her father for not being able to crush the little
man. Edward would make pathetic attempts to capture the role Shivers had
appropriated, to be the practical party himself, to convict Shivers of
idealism. Socialism scandalized him, outraged, even more than atheism,
something within him he held sacred, and he was greatly annoyed because