drew back, puzzled. The man fired and
fascinated her, but there were reservations, apprehensions concerning
him, felt rather than reasoned. Because of her state of rebellion, of
her intense desire to satisfy in action the emotion aroused by a sense
of wrong, his creed had made a violent appeal, but in his voice, in his
eyes, in his manner she had been quick to detect a personal, sexual note
that disturbed and alarmed her, that implied in him a lack of unity.

"I can't, to-night," she said. "I must go home--my mother is all alone.
But I want to help, I want to do something."

They were standing on a corner, under a street lamp. And she averted her
eyes from his glance.

"Then come to-morrow," he said eagerly. "You know where Headquarters is,
in the Franco-Belgian Hall?"

"What could I do?" she asked.

"You? You could help in many ways--among the women. Do you know what
picketing is?"

"You mean keeping the operatives out of the mills?"

"Yes, in the morning, when they go to work. And out of the Chippering
Mill, especially. Ditmar, the agent of that mill, is the ablest of the
lot, I'm told. He's the man we want to cripple."

"Cripple!" exclaimed Janet.

"Oh, I don't mean to harm him personally." Rolfe did not seem to notice
her tone. "But he intends to crush the strike, and I understand he's
importing scabs here to finish out an order--a big order. If it weren't
for him, we'd have an easier fight; he stiffens up the others. There's
always one man like that, in every place. And what we want to do is to
make him shut down, especially."

"I see," said Janet.

"You'll come to Headquarters?" Rolfe repeated.

"Yes, I'll come, to-morrow," she promised.

After she had left him she walked rapidly through several streets, not
heeding her direction--such was the driving power of the new ideas he
had given her. Certain words and phrases he had spoken rang in her head,
and like martial music kept pace with her steps. She strove to remember
all that he had said, to grasp its purport; and because it seemed
recondite, cosmic, it appealed to her and excited her the more. And he,
the man himself, had exerted a kind of hypnotic force that partially
had paralyzed her faculties and aroused her fears while still in his
presence: her first feeling in escaping had been one of relief--and then
she began to regret not having gone to Headquarters. Hadn't she been
foolish? In the retrospect, the elements in him that had disturbed he