He offered Craven a cigarette, which was refused, took one himself, and the two men sat confronting each other with a writing-table between them.  Wharton was disagreeably conscious at times of the stiff papers in his coat-pocket, and was perhaps a little paler than usual.  Otherwise he showed no trace of mental disturbance; and Craven, himself jaded and sleepless, was struck with a momentary perception of his companion’s boyish good looks—­the tumbling curls, that Wharton straightened now and then, the charming blue eyes, the athlete’s frame.  Any stranger would have taken Craven for the older man; in reality it was the other way.

The conversation lasted nearly an hour.  Craven exhausted both argument and entreaty, though when the completeness of the retreat resolved upon had been disclosed to him, the feeling roused in him was so fierce that he could barely maintain his composure.  He had been living among scenes of starvation and endurance, which, to his mind, had all the character of martyrdom.  These men and women were struggling for two objects—­the power to live more humanly, and the free right of combination—­to both of which, if need were, he would have given his own life to help them without an instant’s hesitation.  Behind his blinking manner he saw everything with the idealist’s intensity, the reformer’s passion.  To be fair to an employer was not in his power.  To spend his last breath, were it called for, in the attempt to succour the working-man against his capitalist oppressors, would have seemed to him the merest matter of course.

And his mental acuteness was quite equal to his enthusiasm, and far more evident.  In his talk with Wharton, he for a long time avoided, as before, out of a certain inner disdain, the smallest touch of sentiment.  He pointed out—­what, indeed, Wharton well knew—­that the next two or three weeks of the strike would be the most critical period in its history; that, if the work-people could only be carried through them, they were almost sure of victory.  He gave his own reasons for believing that the employers could ultimately be coerced, he offered proof of yielding among them, proof also that the better men in their ranks were fully alive to and ashamed of the condition of the workers.  As to the Syndicate, he saw no objection to it, provided the workers’ claims were first admitted.  Otherwise it would only prove a more powerful engine of oppression.

Wharton’s arguments may perhaps be left to the imagination.  He would have liked simply to play the proprietor and the master—­to say, “This is my decision, those are my terms—­take my work or leave it.”  But Craven was Miss Boyce’s friend; he was also a Venturist.  Chafing under both facts, Wharton found that he must state his case.

And he did state it with his usual ability.  He laid great stress on “information from a private source which I cannot disregard,” to the effect that, if the resistance went on, the trade would be broken up; that several of the largest employers were on the point of making arrangements for Italian factories.