Myra never forgot this.  It sent her back to her work with wiser and deeper purpose.  And so she fought side by side with Joe through the blacks weeks of that January.  It seemed strange that Joe didn’t go under.  He loomed about the place, a big, stoop-shouldered, gaunt man, with tragic gray face and melancholy eyes and deepening wrinkles.  All the tragedy and pathos and struggle of the strike were marked upon his features.  His face summed up the sorrows of the thirty thousand.  Myra sometimes expected him to collapse utterly.  But he bore on, from day to day, doing his work, meeting his committees, and getting out the paper.

Here, too, Myra found she could help him.  She insisted on writing the strike articles, and as Jacob Izon was also writing, there was only the editorial for Joe to do.  The paper did not miss an issue, and as it now had innumerable canvassers among the strikers, its circulation gained rapidly—­rising finally to 20,000.

Even at this time Joe seemed to take no special notice of Myra.  But one slushy, misty night, when the gas-lamps had rainbow haloes, and gray figures sluff-sluffed through the muddy snow, she accompanied Joe on one of his fund-raising tours.  They entered the side door of a dingy saloon, passed through a yellow hall, and emerged finally on the platform of a large and noisy rear room where several hundred members of the Teamsters’ Union were holding a meeting.  Gas flared above the rough and elemental faces, and Myra felt acutely self-conscious under that concentrated broadside of eyes.  She sat very still, flushing, and feebly smiling, while the outdoor city men blew the air white and black with smoke and raised the temperature to the sweating-point.

Joe was introduced; the men clapped; and then he tried hard to arouse their altruism—­to get them to donate to the strike out of their union funds.  However, his speech came limp and a little stale.  The applause was good-natured but feeble.  Joe sat down, sighing, and smiling grimly.

An amazing yet natural thing happened.  The Chairman arose, leaned over his table, and said: 

“You have heard from Mr. Joe Blaine; now you will hear from the other member of the committee.”

Not for some seconds—­not until the stamping of feet rose to a fury of sound—­did Myra realize that she was the other member.  She had a sense of being drained of life, of losing her breath.  Instinctively she glanced at Joe, and saw that he was looking at her a little dubiously, a little amusedly.  What could she do?  She had never addressed a meeting in her life; she had never stood on her feet before a group of men; she had nothing learned, nothing to say.  But how could she excuse herself, how withdraw, especially in the face of Joe’s challenging gaze?

The stamping increased; the men clapped; and there were shouts: 

“Come ahead!  Come on!  That’s right, Miss.”  It was a cruel test, a wicked predicament.  All the old timidity and sensitiveness of her nature held her back, made her tremble, and bathed her face in perspiration.  But a new Myra kept saying: