and was busily making jottings.  He seemed, if anything, more worn than ever, more tired.  He was living on his nerves.  The gray face was enough to bring tears to a woman’s eyes, and the lank, ill-clothed form seemed in danger of thinning away to nothingness.  So Myra said nothing, but kept looking at him, trying to save him by her strength of love, trying to send out those warm currents and wrap him up and infuse him with life and light and joy.

All the way out he had been silent, preoccupied.  In fact, all these three days he had been preoccupied—­toiling terribly early and late, busy, the center of a swarm of human activities, his voice everywhere, his pen in his hand.  Meals he ate at his desk while he wrote, and sleep was gained in little snatches.  Myra had been there to watch him, there to help him.  Since that night in the court, she had come early and stayed until ten in the evening, doing what work she could.  And there was much to be done—­she found a profitable task in instructing new recruits in the rules of picketing—­and also in investigating cases of need.  These took her to strange places.  She had vistas of life she had not dreamed to be true—­misery she had thought confined to novels, to books like Les Miserables.  It was all wonderful and strange and new.  She was beginning to really know the life of the Greater Number—­the life of the Nine-Tenths—­and as she got used to the dust, the smells, and the squalor, she found daily all the richness of human nature.  It was dramatic, absorbing, real.  Where was it leading her?  She hardly knew yet.  The strangeness had not worn off.

She had been watching Joe, and she felt that he was hardly aware of her presence.  He took her and her work as a matter of course.  And this did not embitter her, for she felt that the time had passed for privileges, that this was a season in Joe’s life when he belonged to a mass of the people, to a great cause, and that she had no right to any part of his life.  He was so deep in it, so overwrought, that it was best to let him alone, to keep him free from the responsibility of personal relationships, not to burden him with added emotionalism.  And so she accepted the rule of Joe’s mother—­to do Joe’s bidding without question, to let him have his way, waiting patiently for the time when he would need and cry out for the personal.  When that time came the two women were ready to help to heal, to nurse—­to bind the wounds and soothe the troubled heart, and rebuild the broken spirit.  It might be, of course, that in the end he would shut Myra out; that was a contingency she had to face; but she thought that, whatever came, she was getting herself equal to it.

They left the ferry and walked over to Second Avenue and took an elevated train.  Then Joe spoke—­leaning near, his voice gentle: 

“Myra.”

“Yes, Joe.”

“I’ve been wondering.”

“What?”

“About this strike business.  Wondering if it isn’t mostly waste.”