of this work of relief. Eleanore would be good at this,
she had trained herself in just such work. And it appealed to her at
once. She went down with me the next morning, and she and Nora Ganey,
though their lives had been so different, yet proved at once to be
kindred souls. Eleanore gave half her time to the work, and these two
became fast friends.

Before the strike Nora had sat all day in an office pounding a
typewriter, several nights a week she had gone to dances in public
halls, and that had made her entire life. In the strike she was at her
food station all day, and each evening till late she visited homes,
looking into appeals for aid and if need be issuing tickets for food.
She heard the bitterest stories from wives of harbor victims, and she
began telling these stories in speeches. Soon she was sent out over the
city to speak at meetings and ask for aid. With Eleanore I went one
night to hear this young stenographer speak to twenty thousand in
Madison Square Garden. And the strike leader who made that speech was
not the girl of two weeks before. Her life had been as utterly changed
as though she had jumped to another world.

Through Marsh and Joe, in those tense days, I was fast making striker
friends. With some I had long intimate talks, I ate many kitchen suppers
and spent many evenings in tenement homes. But though by degrees I felt
myself drawn to these men who called me "Bill," when alone with each one
I felt little or none of that passion born of the crowd as a whole. With
a sharp drop, a sudden reaction, I would feel this new world gone. Its
strength and its wide vision would seem like mere illusions now. What
could we little pigmies do with the world? Its guidance was for Dillon
and all the big men I had known. Often in those days of groping, knotty
problems all unsolved, with a sickening hunger I would think of those
men at the top, of their keen minds so thoroughly trained, their vast
experience in affairs. I would feel myself in a hopeless mob, a dense,
heavy jungle of ignorant minds. And groping for a foothold here I would
find only chaos.

But back we would go into the crowd, and there in a twinkling we would
be changed. Once more we were members of the whole and took on its huge
personality. And again the vision came to me, the dream of a weary world
set free, a world where poverty and pain and all the bitterness they
bring might in the end be swept away by this awakening giant here--which
d