what can a man do with a wife when
he's here to-day and off to the other end of the land to-morrow lookin'
for a job? A steady job in one place where it's fit for a woman to live
ain't to be found every day.... A workingman who marries, unless he's
got money in the bank and a sure payin' job that'll last, is a fool or
worse. What good is it to bring children into the world to be like him
or maybe worse?"

Adelle had no reply to this blunt logic. Marriage, he seemed to think,
was one of the privileges of the rich class, which she was sure ought
not to be so.

"The trouble with the workingman, ma'am, is that he has done that too
long,--got families that had to live the best they could, any old way,
and take any old job they could get. That's what's made it easy goin'
for you! But the workingman is learnin' a thing or two. Men like me
won't get married, nor have children to slave for the rich."

"What do the girls do?" Adelle asked, thinking of her own fate if she
had been left in the Church Street rooming-house.

The mason shrugged his shoulders and came out with another brutality.

"Some of 'em go into the houses for your men to use--there's always that
for 'em," he added, with a disagreeable laugh. "No, ma'am, I tell you
until things are made more right in this world, it's better for a poor
man to get along the best he can without draggin' a woman after him and
a lot of helpless children."

"I didn't know it was as bad as that," Adelle remarked helplessly.

"I guess, ma'am, there are a good many things about life you don't
know."

"That's so," Adelle admitted honestly.

"But I know!" the mason exclaimed with rising excitement. "I've seen it
over and over, everywhere. I've seen it in my own family," he said in a
burst of bitter confidence. "There were eight of us and we were only
middling poor until father died. The old man was a carpenter, up north
in Sacramento County. He had a small place outside of town and we raised
some stuff. But he got sick and died, when he weren't forty, and mother
had the whole eight of us on her hands. I was just twelve and my oldest
brother fifteen,--he was the only one could earn a dollar. We got on
somehow, those that lived. Two of my sisters are married to farmers and
there's another--well, she's the other thing." He stopped to look
belligerently at Adelle as if she had somehow to do with it. "She was
married to a workingman, good enough, I guess, but he got out of work
and he