cannot fulfill, mother. I am engaged to him."

"Then you love him more than you do any of us, or all of us."

"I don't know. It is different," she said vaguely.

She kissed her mother very tenderly when she went away, but there was
a feeling of finality in them both. Mademoiselle, waiting at the top of
the stairs, heard the door close and could not believe her ears. Grace
went upstairs, her face a blank before the servants, and shut herself
in her room. And in Lily's boudoir the roses spread a heavy, funereal
sweetness over the empty room.

CHAPTER XXIV

The strike had been carried on with comparatively little disorder.
In some cities there had been rioting, but half-hearted and
easily controlled. Almost without exception it was the foreign and
unassimilated element that broke the peace. Alien women spat on the
state police, and flung stones at them. Here and there property
was destroyed. A few bomb outrages filled the newspapers with great
scare-heads, and sent troops and a small army of secret service men here
and there.

In the American Federation of Labor a stocky little man grimly fought to
oppose the Radical element, which was slowly gaining ground, and at the
same time to retain his leadership. The great steel companies, united
at last by a common danger and a common fate if they yielded, stood
doggedly and courageously together, waiting for a return of sanity to
the world. The world seemed to have gone mad. Everywhere in the country
production was reduced by the cessation of labor, and as a result the
cost of living was mounting.

And every strike lost in the end. Labor had yet to learn that to cease
to labor may express a grievance, but that in itself it righted no
wrongs. Rather, it turned that great weapon, public opinion, without
which no movement may succeed, against it. And that to stand behind
the country in war was not enough. It must stand behind the country in
peace.

It had to learn, too, that a chain is only as strong as its weakest
link. The weak link in the labor chain was its Radical element. Rioters
were arrested with union cards in their pockets. In vain the unions
protested their lack of sympathy with the unruly element. The vast
respectable family of union labor found itself accused of the sins of
the minority, and lost standing thereby.

At Friendship the unruly element was very strong. For a time it held its
meetings in a hall. When that was closed it resorted to the open ai