There was much talk of rights, Veronica thought, nowadays, and those who had none were privileged to speak the loudest and to be heard first.

But those who, having right on their side, were blinded and smitten dumb by the enormous despotism of their self-styled betters--by the glare and noise of blatant power in possession--they were the ones who really had rights, and if she could give any of them a single hundredth part of what was their due, she should be glad that she had lived.

Wealth, she thought, should not be an accumulation, but a distribution, of goods.

Charity should no longer mean alms, nor should poverty be pauperism.

In the young, whole-hearted simplicity of her desire to do good, it seemed likely that she might soon be a specimen of the strangest of all modern anomalies--the princely socialist.