t 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
picked up h