ding on the corners or talking
in saloons?

Later, exhausted by her grief, when the tears no longer fell, she grew
more impersonal, and dwelt on the disasters that had befallen so many
women since the strike troubles began--Otto Frank's wife, Henderson's
widow, pretty Kittie Brady, Mary, all the womenfolk of the other workmen
who were now wearing the stripes in San Quentin. Her world was crashing
about her ears. No one was exempt. Not only had she not escaped, but
hers was the worst disgrace of all. Desperately she tried to hug the
delusion that she was asleep, that it was all a nightmare, and that soon
the alarm would go off and she would get up and cook Billy's breakfast
so that he could go to work.

She did not leave the bed that day. Nor did she sleep. Her brain whirled
on and on, now dwelling at insistent length upon her misfortunes, now
pursuing the most fantastic ramifications of what she considered her
disgrace, and, again, going back to her childhood and wandering through
endless trivial detail. She worked at all the tasks she had ever done,
performing, in fancy, the myriads of mechanical movements peculiar to
each occupation--shaping and pasting in the paper box factory, ironing
in the laundry, weaving in the jute mill, peeling fruit in the cannery
and countless boxes of scalded tomatoes. She attended all her dances and
all her picnics over again; went through her school days, recalling the
face and name and seat of every schoolmate; endured the gray bleakness
of the years in the orphan asylum; revisioned every memory of her
mother, every tale; and relived all her life with Billy. But ever--and
here the torment lay--she was drawn back from these far-wanderings
to her present trouble, with its parch in the throat, its ache in the
breast, and its gnawing, vacant goneness.

CHAPTER XV

All that night Saxon lay, unsleeping, without taking off her clothes,
and when she arose in the morning and washed her face and dressed her
hair she was aware of a strange numbness, of a feeling of constriction
about her head as if it were bound by a heavy band of iron. It seemed
like a dull pressure upon her brain. It was the beginning of an illness
that she did not know as illness. All she knew was that she felt queer.
It was not fever. It was not cold. Her bodily health was as it should
be, and, when she thought about it, she put her condition down to
nerves--nerves, according to her ideas and the ideas of her class, bei