thday, and as the
Grand Opera was there for a week and I had never been to one, I got Mr.
Marsh to take me. We made it a regular celebration, with dinner in a
first-class restaurant just for once. But my husband is generally
watched, and the papers all took it up the next day. 'Marsh and wife
dine and see opera after his speech to starving strikers,' or similar
words to that effect."

"Do you see anything of the strikers?" I asked.

"Not much," she replied. "We used to be invited to go to parties at
their homes. But most of them, even the leaders, were Irish, Germans,
Italians or Jews whose wives could barely speak English. I found them
not very pleasant affairs. Some of the wives drank a good deal of beer
and most of them had very little to say. Strike dances were no better.
The wives as a rule sat with their children around the walls--while a
lot of young factory girls, Jewesses for the most part, danced turkey
trots around the hall."

"There were speeches, I suppose?" Sue put in impatiently.

"Yes--Mr. Marsh and others made speeches between dances. They weren't
the kind of affairs I'd been used to in our home town," said Mrs. Marsh.
"I've lost track of the folks at home. I never write and they don't
write me. Only once when my mother knew where I was she sent me a box at
Christmas. Lucy and I got quite excited over that box, it was all the
presents we'd had from outside in quite a line of Christmases. So we
thought we'd celebrate."

"How did you celebrate Christmas?" Eleanore asked softly.

"We went out and bought a tree and candles, some gold balls and popcorn
and all the other fixings. And we popped the corn over the gas that
night. The next day we bought things for each other's stockings. Lucy
was then only four years old, but I'd leave her at a counter and tell
the clerk to let her have all she wanted to buy for me up to a dollar.
That was how we worked it. The next night we had the tree in our room. I
got Mr. Marsh to help me trim it. At last we lit the candles and let
Lucy in from the hotel hall, where she'd nearly caught her death of
cold. Then we opened the box from home. There was a doll for Lucy and a
framed photograph of my mother for me--and for Mr. Marsh a Bible. He got
laughing over that and so did I. And that ended Christmas.

"We had another Christmas last year," she said in a slow, intense sort
of way as though seeing the place as she spoke, "in a mining town in
Montana, where Jim had been in