And the dark, earnest men who scanned the equipages with
half-contemptuous, half-threatening looks--she knew them all.

Had not she herself, as a little girl, lain in a corner and
listened, wide-eyed, to their talk about the injustice of life, the
tyranny of the rich, and the rights of the laborer, which he had
only to reach out his hand to seize?

She knew that they hated everything--the sleek horses, the
dignified coachmen, the shining carriages, and, most of all, the
people who sat within them--these insatiable vampires, these
ladies, whose ornaments for the night cost more gold than any one
of them could earn by the work of a whole lifetime.

And as she looked along the line of carriages, as it dragged on
slowly through the crowd, another memory flashed into her mind--a
half-forgotten picture from her school-life in the convent.

She suddenly came to think of the story of Pharaoh and his
war-chariots following the children of Israel through the Red Sea.
She saw the waves, which she had always imagined red as blood,
piled up like a wall on both sides of the Egyptians.

Then the voice of Moses sounded. He stretched out his staff over
the waters, and the Red Sea waves hurtled together and swallowed up
Pharaoh and all his chariots.

She knew that the wall which stood on each side of her was wilder
and more rapacious than the waves of the sea; she knew that it
needed only a voice, a Moses, to set all this human sea in motion,