Mrs. Knefler explained to the mouthpiece (take it either way) that it would be quite useless; that the stand of the League was taken on Mr. Troy’s previous record and on the “interests” he represented; that while they had nothing against him in his private capacity, as a public servant they must oppose him.  All this in Mrs. Knefler’s suavest fashion.  She feels intensely, but she never loses her self-possession.  That’s why she is such a formidable antagonist.

It was the last week in June—­they had just a month before the primaries in which to rouse public opinion.  The newspapers must help, of course.

Mrs. Knefler went to the editors.  They were polite, they admitted the justice of her stand, but they were evasive.  Mrs. Knefler opened her paper the next morning after she had made the rounds, to find not a single word about the danger to the working woman’s interests.

What could the papers do?  Weren’t they in the hands of the “big cinch,” as a certain combination of business men in St. Louis is known?  Naturally they refused to print a line.  You never step on your own toe, do you, or hit yourself in the face—­if you can help it?

One must admit that things looked bad for the League.  How were girls who raced at machines all day, who had neither money nor the voice of the press, to rouse this sluggish, corrupt city to the menace of sending to the legislature men like E.J.  Troy, pledged body and soul to the manufacturers?  How could they waken the public to woman’s bitter necessity for shorter hours?  The case looked hopeless, but Mrs. Knefler merely set her teeth, and got busy—­decidedly busy.

She planned a campaign that no other St. Louis woman in her class would have had the courage to tackle.  Mrs. Knefler is a member of the club that is the St. Louis clubwomen’s “holy of holies.”  They have a club-house that just drips art, and they steep themselves in self-culture.  As a group their consciousness of the city’s industrial problems is still nebulous.  The high light in which Mrs. Knefler’s work must inevitably stand out is intensified by this background of self-culture women, with a few—­only a few—­rash daughters shivering around preparatory to taking their first cold plunge in the suffrage pool.

In such an atmosphere Cynthelia Knefler planned and carried out the biggest, the most modern and strategic campaign for the working woman ever waged outside a suffrage state.  It was done simply because her heart was filled with the need of the thousands of helpless, unorganized girls for protection from the greed of organized capital.

There are moments when love gives vision and raises us head and shoulders above our group.  So it was with Cynthelia Knefler, brought up in this conservative city, educated in a prunes-and-prisms girls’ school, steeped in the Southern idea that no “lady” would ever let her picture or her opinions get into the newspapers, and that making public speeches was quite unthinkable!