Joe sat up.

“Have they found you out?  Do they come to you?”

“They do—­especially the young wives with their troubles.  All of them troubled over their husbands and their children.  We have the finest talks together.  They’re a splendid lot!”

“Who’s come, in particular?”

“Well, there’s one who isn’t married—­one of the best of them.”

“Not Sally Heffer!”

“The same!”

“I’m dinged!”

“That girl,” said Joe’s mother, “has all sorts of possibilities—­and she’s brave and strong and true.  Sally’s a wonder! a new kind of woman!”

A new kind of woman!  Joe remembered the phrase, and in the end admitted that it was true.  Sally was of the new breed; she represented the new emancipation; the exodus of woman from the home to the battle-fields of the world; the willingness to fight in the open, shoulder to shoulder with men; the advance of a sex that now demanded a broader, freer life, a new health, a home built up on comradeship and economic freedom.  In all of these things she contrasted sharply with Myra, and Joe always thought of the two together.

But unconsciously Sally was always the fellow-worker—­Myra—­what Myra meant he could feel but not explain; yet these crowded days left little time for thoughts sweet but often intense with pain.  He wrote to her rarely—­mere jottings of business and health; he rarely heard from her.  Her message was invariably the same—­the richness and quiet of country life, the depth and peace of rest, the hope that he was well and happy.  She never mentioned his paper—­though she received every number—­and when Joe inquired once whether it came, she answered in a postscript:  “The paper?  It’s in every Monday’s mail.”  This neglect irritated Joe, and he would doubly enjoy Sally’s heart-and-soul passion for The Nine-Tenths.

Sally was growing into his working life, day by day.  Her presence was stimulating, refreshing.  If he felt blue and discouraged, or dried up and in want of inspiration, he merely called her over, and her quiet talk, her sane views, her quick thinking, her never-failing good humor and faith, acted upon him as a tonic.

“Miss Sally,” he said once, “what would I ever do without you?”

Sally looked at him with her clear eyes.

“Oh,” she said, “I guess you’d manage to stagger along somehow.”

But after that she hovered about him like a guardian angel.  What bothered her chiefly, when she thought of Joe’s work, was her lack of education, and she set about to make this up by good reading, and by attending lectures at night, and by hard study in such time as she could snatch from her work.  She and Joe were comrades in the best sense.  They could always depend upon each other.  It was in some ways as if they were in partnership.  And then there was that old tie of the fire to draw them together.

She was of great help in setting him right about the poor.