“I just wanted to see you—­see the place—­see how things were getting on.”

Joe laughed softly.

“Things are getting on.  Circulation’s up to fifteen thousand—­due to the strike.”

“How so?”

“We got out a strike edition—­and the girls peddled it around town, and lots subscribed.  It’s given the paper a big boost.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Myra found herself saying.

“You glad?” If only his voice hadn’t been so weary!  “That’s strange, Myra.”

“It is strange!” she said, her eyes suffused again.  His gray, tragic face seemed to be working on the very strings of her heart.  She longed so to help him, to heal him, to breathe joy and strength into him.

“Joe!” she said.

He looked at her again.

“Yes, Myra.”

“Oh—­I—­” She paused.

He smiled.

“Say it!”

“Isn’t there some way I can help?”

A strange expression came to his face, of surprise, of wonder.

“You help?”

“Yes—­I—­”

“Mr. Blaine!  Mr. Blaine!” Some one across the room was calling.  “There’s an employer here to see you!”

Joe leaped up, took Myra’s hand, and spoke hastily.

“Wait and meet my mother.  And come again—­sometime.  Sometime when I’m not so rushed!”

And he was gone—­gone out of the room.

Myra arose, still warm with the touch of his hand—­for his hand was almost fever-warm.  All that she knew was that he had suffered and was suffering, and that she must help.  She was burning now with an eagerness to learn about the strike, to understand what it was that so depressed and enslaved him, what it was that was slowly killing him.  Her old theories met the warm clasp of life and vanished.  She forgot her viewpoint and her delicacy.  Life was too big for her shallow philosophy.  It seized upon her now and absorbed her.

She strode back to the young girl, who she learned later was named Rhona
Hemlitz, and who was but seventeen years old.

She said:  “Tell me about the strike!  Can’t we sit down together and talk?  Have you time?”

“I have a little time,” said Rhona, eagerly.  “We can sit here!”

So they sat side by side and Rhona told her.  Rhona’s whole family was engaged in sweat-work.  They lived in a miserable tenement over in Hester Street, where her mother had been toiling from dawn until midnight with the needle, with her tiny brother helping to sew on buttons, “finishing” daily a dozen pairs of pants, and making—­thirty cents.

Myra was amazed.

“Thirty cents—­dawn till midnight!  Impossible!”

And then her father—­who worked all day in a sweatshop.

“And you—­what did you do?” asked Myra.