jail five days and the whole place was
under martial law. A major of the militia came to me on Christmas Eve.
He claimed that Jim had been seen by detectives traveling with another
woman and that I was not his wife. They locked me up for two hours that
night as an immoral woman."

Sue was sitting rigid now, her lips pressed tight. And Joe with a
strained unnatural face was staring into the fire.

"But of course," Mrs. Marsh concluded, "most of the time it isn't like
that. As a rule when we come to a city nothing especial happens at all.
We just take a room like the one we have now and wait till the strike is
over. I've got so I have a queer view of towns. I'm always there at the
time of a strike, when crowds of Italians and Poles and Jews fill the
streets on parade or jam into halls and talk about running the world by
themselves. And I guess they're going to do it some day--but I presume
not by to-morrow."

For some time while she was speaking her eyes had been fixed steadily
upon Joe's only picture. It stood on the mantel, a big charcoal sketch
of a crowd of immigrants just leaving Ellis Island. They were of all
races. Uncouth, heavy, stolid, with that hungry hope in all their eyes
for more of the good things of the earth, they seemed like some barbaric
horde about to pour in over the land. With her eyes upon their faces in
deep, quiet hatred this woman from the Middle West had told the story of
her life.

* * * * *

"Well, Sally," said her husband, who had grown restive toward the end,
"I guess that'll do. Let's go on home."

"I'm sure I'm ready," she quickly replied. Now that she had come out of
herself she seemed angry at having told so much.

When they had left there was a silence, which Sue broke with a breath of
impatience.

"What a frightful thing it must be for a man in this work," she
exclaimed, "to have a wife like that! A woman so hard and narrow, so
wrapped up in her own little life, with not a spark of sympathy for any
of his big ideals!"

"I suppose it's the life that has done it," said Eleanore quietly,
looking at Sue.

"I'd like to see some women," Sue retorted angrily, "who have been in
that life for years and years, and _have_ sympathy, have _everything_,
don't care for anything else in the world!" She turned suddenly to Joe.
"You said there were hundreds, didn't you?"

Joe looked back at her a moment. There was a startled, groping,
searching expression i