ered in East Street and attacked the
Chippering; and he urged the treasurer to waste no time in obtaining a
force of detectives, in securing in Boston and New York all the
operatives that could be hired, in order to break the impending strike.
Save for this untimely and unreasonable revolt he was bent on stamping
out, for Ditmar the world to-day was precisely the same world it had been
the day before. It seemed incredible to Janet that he could so regard it,
could still be blind to the fact that these workers whom he was
determined to starve and crush if they dared to upset his plans and
oppose his will were human beings with wills and passions and grievances
of their own. Until to-day her eyes had been sealed. In agony they had
been opened to the panorama of sorrow and suffering, of passion and evil;
and what she beheld now as life was a vast and terrible cruelty. She had
needed only this final proof to be convinced that in his eyes she also
was but one of those brought into the world to minister to his pleasure
and profit. He had taken from her, as his weed, the most precious thing a
woman has to give, and now that she was here again at his side, by some
impulse incomprehensible to herself--in spite of the wrong he had done
her!--had sought him out in danger, he had no thought of her, no word for
her, no use save a menial one: he cared nothing for any help she might be
able to give, he had no perception of the new light which had broken
within her soul.... The telephoning seemed interminable, yet she waited
with a strange patience while he talked with Mr. George Chippering and
two of the most influential directors. These conversations had covered
the space of an hour or more. And perhaps as a result of self-suggestion,
of his repeated assurances to Mr. Semple, to Mr. Chippering, and the
directors of his ability to control the situation, Ditmar's habitual
self-confidence was gradually restored. And when at last he hung up the
instrument and turned to her, though still furious against the strikers,
his voice betrayed the joy of battle, the assurance of victory.

"They can't bluff me, they'll have to guess again. It's that damned
Holster--he hasn't any guts--he'd give in to 'em right now if I'd let
him. It's the limit the way he turned the Clarendon over to them. I'll
show him how to put a crimp in 'em if they don't turn up here to-morrow
morning."

He was so magnificently sure of her sympathy! She did, not reply, but
p