edition--and the girls peddled it around town, and
lots subscribed. It's given the paper a big boost."

"I'm glad to hear it," Myra found herself saying.

"_You_ glad?" If only his voice hadn't been so weary! "That's strange,
Myra."

"It _is_ strange!" she said, her eyes suffused again. His gray, tragic
face seemed to be working on the very strings of her heart. She longed
so to help him, to heal him, to breathe joy and strength into him.

"Joe!" she said.

He looked at her again.

"Yes, Myra."

"Oh--I--" She paused.

He smiled.

"Say it!"

"Isn't there some way I can help?"

A strange expression came to his face, of surprise, of wonder.

"_You_ help?"

"Yes--I--"

"Mr. Blaine! Mr. Blaine!" Some one across the room was calling. "There's
an employer here to see you!"

Joe leaped up, took Myra's hand, and spoke hastily.

"Wait and meet my mother. And come again--sometime. Sometime when I'm
not so rushed!"

And he was gone--gone out of the room.

Myra arose, still warm with the touch of his hand--for his hand was
almost fever-warm. All that she knew was that he had suffered and was
suffering, and that she must help. She was burning now with an eagerness
to learn about the strike, to understand what it was that so depressed
and enslaved him, what it was that was slowly killing him. Her old
theories met the warm clasp of life and vanished. She forgot her
viewpoint and her delicacy. Life was too big for her shallow philosophy.
It seized upon her now and absorbed her.

She strode back to the young girl, who she learned later was named Rhona
Hemlitz, and who was but seventeen years old.

She said: "Tell me about the strike! Can't we sit down together and
talk? Have you time?"

"I have a little time," said Rhona, eagerly. "We can sit here!"

So they sat side by side and Rhona told her. Rhona's whole family was
engaged in sweat-work. They lived in a miserable tenement over in Hester
Street, where her mother had been toiling from dawn until midnight with
the needle, with her tiny brother helping to sew on buttons, "finishing"
daily a dozen pairs of pants, and making--_thirty cents_.

Myra was amazed.

"Thirty cents--dawn till midnight! Impossible!"

And then her father--who worked all day in a sweatshop.

"And you--what did you do?" asked Myra.

Rhona told her. She had worked in Zandler's shirtwaist factory--bending
over a power-machine, whose ten needles made forty-four hundred stitches
a min