cent. We went cold often, but we were
never hungry. But then it fell again,--to ninety cents, to eighty-five.
For a year the best that I can do I have earned not over eighty cents a
day,--sometimes only seventy-five. I'm sixty-two years old. I can't
learn new ways. I am strong. I always was strong. I run the machine
fourteen hours a day, with just the stoppings that have to be to get the
work ready. I've never asked a man alive for a penny beyond what my own
hands can earn, and I don't want it. I suppose the Lord knows what it
all means. It's His world and His children in it, and I've kept myself
from going crazy many a time by saying it was His world and that somehow
it must all come right in the end. But I don't believe it any more. He's
forgotten. There's nothing left but men that live to grind the face of
the poor; that chuckle when they find a new way of making a cent or two
more a week out of starving women and children. I never thought I
should feel so; I don't know myself; but I tell you I'm ready for murder
when I think of these men. If there's no justice above, it isn't quite
dead below; and if men with money will not heed, the men and the women
without money will rise some day. How? I don't know. We've no time to
plan, and we're too tired to think, but it's coming somehow, and I'm not
ashamed to say I'll join in if I live to see it come. It's seas of tears
that these men sail on. It's our life-blood they drink and our flesh
that they eat. God help them if the storm comes, for there'll be no help
in man."

Employer and employed had ended in wellnigh the same words; but the gulf
between no words have spanned, and it widens day by day.

CHAPTER FIFTH.

A FASHIONABLE DRESSMAKER.

"Come now, be reasonable, won't you? You've got to move on, you know,
and why don't you do it?"

"I'm that reasonable that a bench of judges couldn't be more so; and
I'll not move on for anything less than dynamite, and I ain't sure I
would for that. It's only a choice between starvation and going into the
next world in little bits, and I don't suppose it makes much difference
which way it's done."

The small, pale, dogged-looking little woman who announced this
conviction did not even rise from the steps where she sat looking up to
the big policeman, who faced her uneasily, half turning as if he would
escape the consequences of rash action if he knew how. Nothing could be
more mysterious. For it was within sight of Broad