ossible life. And even worse for your father. He's
not only old and excitable, and very weak and feeble, too, but he's so
conservative besides that if Sue married Joe Kramer he'd consider her
utterly damned."

"But I tell you you're wrong, all wrong!" I broke in. "Joe isn't that
kind of an idiot!"

"Joe," said my wife decidedly, "is like every man I've ever met. I found
that out when he was sick. He has the old natural longing for a wife and
a home of his own. His glimpse of it here may have started it rising.
I'm no more sure than you are that he admits it to himself. But it's
there all the same in the back of his mind, and in that same mysterious
region he's trying to reconcile marrying Sue to the work which he
believes in--even with this strike coming on. It's perfectly pathetic.

"Isn't it funny," she added, "how sometimes everything comes all at
once? Do you know what this may mean to us? I don't, I haven't the least
idea. I only know that you yourself are horribly unsettled--and that now
through this affair of Sue's we'll have to see a good deal of Joe--and
not only Joe but his friends on the docks--and not even the quiet ones.
No, we're to see all the wild ones. We're to be drawn right into this
strike--into what Joe calls revolution."

"You may be right," I said doggedly. "But I don't believe it."

CHAPTER VIII

A few days later Joe called me up and asked me to come down to his
office. His reason for wanting to see me, he said, he'd rather not give
me over the 'phone.

"You're right," I told Eleanore dismally. "He's going to talk to me
about Sue."

I dreaded this talk, and I went to see Joe in no easy frame of mind. But
it was not about Sue. I saw that in my first glimpse of his face. He sat
half around in his office chair listening intensely to a man by his
side.

"I want you to meet Jim Marsh," he said.

I felt a little electric shock. So here was the great mob agitator, the
notorious leader of strikes. Eleanore's words came into my mind: "We're
to meet all the wild ones. We're to be drawn right into this
strike--into what Joe calls revolution." Well, here was the
arch-revolutionist, the prime mover of them all. Of middle size, about
forty years old, angular and wiry, there was a lithe easy force in his
limbs, but he barely moved as he spoke to me now. He just turned his
narrow bony face and gave me a glance with his keen gray eyes.

"I've known your work for quite a while," he said in a