tters until called to its attention....

Later on a tall gentleman, whom heaven had not blessed with tact, saw
fit to deplore the violence that had occurred; he had no doubt the
leaders of the strike regretted it as much as he, he was confident it
would be stopped, when public opinion would be wholly and unreservedly
on the side of the strikers.

"Public opinion!" savagely cried Lindtzki, who spoke English with only a
slight accent. "If your little boy, if your little girl come to you
and ask for shoes, for bread, and you say, 'I have no shoes, I have no
bread, but public opinion is with us,' would that satisfy you?"

This drew so much applause that the tall law-maker sat down again with
a look of disgust on his face.... The Committee withdrew, and for many
weeks thereafter the state they represented continued to pay some
four thousand dollars daily to keep its soldiers on the streets of
Hampton....

In the meanwhile Janet saw much of Rolfe. Owing to his facile command
of language he was peculiarly fitted to draft those proclamations,
bombastically worded in the French style, issued and circulated by the
Strike Committee--appeals to the polyglot army to withstand the pangs of
hunger, to hold out for the terms laid down, assurances that victory
was at hand. Walking up and down the bibliotheque, his hands behind his
back, his red lips gleaming as he spoke, he dictated these documents to
Janet. In the ecstasy of this composition he had a way of shaking his
head slowly from side to side, and when she looked up she saw his eyes
burning, down at her. A dozen times a day, while she was at her other
work, he would come in and talk to her. He excited her, she was divided
between attraction and fear of him, and often she resented his easy
assumption that a tie existed between them--the more so because this
seemed to be taken for granted among certain of his associates. In their
eyes, apparently, she was Rolfe's recruit in more senses than one.
It was indeed a strange society in which she found herself, and Rolfe
typified it. He lived on the plane of the impulses and intellect,
discarded as inhibiting factors what are called moral standards, decried
individual discipline and restraint. And while she had never considered
these things, the spectacle of a philosophy--embodied in him--that
frankly and cynically threw them overboard was disconcerting. He
regarded her as his proselyte, he called her a Puritan, and he seemed
more con