Then--eighteen centuries after--came that second Jew''--Selma
looked passionate, reverent admiration at the powerful, bearded
face, so masterful, yet so kind--``and he said: `No! not in the
hereafter, but in the here. Here and now, my brothers. Let us
make this world a heaven. Let us redeem ourselves and destroy
the devil of ignorance who is holding us in this hell.' It was
three hundred years before that first Jew began to triumph. It
won't be so long before there are monuments to Marx in clean and
beautiful and free cities all over the earth.''
Jane listened intensely. There was admiring envy in her eyes as
she cried: ``How splendid!--to believe in something--and work
for it and live for it--as you do!''
Selma laughed, with a charming little gesture of the shoulders
and the hands that reminded Jane of her foreign parentage.
``Nothing else seems worth while,'' said she. ``Nothing else is
worth while. There are only two entirely great careers--to be a
teacher of the right kind and work to ease men's minds--as those
four did--or to be a doctor of the right kind and work to make
mankind healthy. All the suffering, all the crime, all the
wickedness, comes from ignorance or bad health--or both. Usually
it's simply bad health.''
Jane felt as if she were devoured of thirst and drinking at a
fresh, sparkling spring. ``I never thought of that before,''
said she.
``If you find out all about any criminal, big or little, you'll
discover that he had bad health--poisons in his blood that goaded
him on.
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