was
near Joe, content because it saved money (her savings were dwindling
rapidly these days), and finally content because she had shifted the
center of her interests to a different set of facts. She was both too
busy and too aroused to be sensitive about running water and the minor
comforts. Her whole being was engrossed in large activities, and she
found with astonishment how many things she could do without. What
previously had seemed so important, poetry, music, dress, quiet, ease,
now became little things lost in a host of new big events. And,
curiously enough, she found a new happiness in this freedom from
superfluities--a sense of range and independence new to her. For at this
time such things actually were superfluous, though the time was to come
again when music and poetry had a new and heightened meaning.

But during these days of the strike she was a quite free woman,
snatching her sleep and her food carelessly, and putting in her time in
spending heart and soul on the problem in hand. She dressed simply, in
shirtwaist and skirt, and she moved among the people as if she were one
of them, and with no sense of contrast. In fact, Myra was changing,
changing rapidly. Her work called for a new set of powers, and without
hesitation these new powers rose within her, emerged and became a part
of her character. She became executive, quick, stepped into any
situation that confronted her, knew when to be mild, when to be sharp,
sensed where sympathy was needed, and also where sympathy merely
softened and ruined. Her face, too, followed this inner change. Soft
lines merged into something more vivid. She was usually pale, and her
sweet, small mouth had a weary droop, but her eyes were keen and living,
and lit with vital force.

She began to see that a life of ease and a life of extreme toil were
both equally bad--that each choked off possibilities. She knew then that
women of her type walked about with hidden powers unused, their lives
narrowed and blighted, negative people who only needed some great test,
some supreme task, to bring out those hidden forces, which, gushing
through the soul, overflowing, would make of them characters of
abounding vitality. She felt the glory of men and women who go about the
world bubbling over with freshness and zest and life, warming the lives
they move among, spreading by quick contagion their faith and virility.
She longed to be such a person--to train herself in that greatest of all