“What did I tell you?” she cried.

Even then Ellen would not believe.  She caught a glimpse of Robert’s fair head at the office window, and a great impulse of love and loyalty came over her.

“I don’t believe it,” she said aloud to Maria.  Maria held her arm tightly.

“Maybe it isn’t so,” she said.

But when they entered the room where they worked, there was a sullen group before a placard tacked on the wall.  Ellen pressed closely, and saw what it was—­a reduced wage-list.  Then she went to her machine.

Chapter XLVIII

Ellen had a judicial turn of mind, as her school-master had once said of her.  She was able to look at matters from more than one stand-point, but she reasoned with a New Testament clearness of impartiality.  She was capable of uncompromising severity, since she brought such a clear light of youth and childhood to bear upon even those things which needed shadows for their true revelation.  Everything was for her either black or white.  She had not lived long enough, perhaps she never would, for a comprehension of half-tones.  The situation to her mind was perfectly simple, and she viewed it with a candor which was at once terrible and cruel, for it involved cruelty not only to Robert but to herself.  She said to herself, here was this rich man, this man with accumulation of wealth, not one dollar of which he had earned himself, either by his hands or his brains, but which had been heaped up for his uncle by the heart and back breaking toil of all these poor men and women; and now he was going to abuse his power of capital, his power to take the bread out of their mouths entirely, by taking it out in part.  He was going to reduce their wages, he was deliberately going to cause privation, and even suffering where there were large families.  She felt the most unqualified dissent and indignation, and all the love which she had for the man only intensified it.  Love, with a girl like this, tended to clearness of vision instead of blindness.  She judged him as she would have judged herself.  As she stood working at her machine, stitching linings to vamps, she kept a sharply listening ear for what went on about her, but there was very little to hear after work had fairly commenced and the great place was in full hum.  The demand of labor was so imperative that the laborers themselves were merged in it; they ceased to be for the time, and, instead of living, they became parts of the struggle for life.  A man hustling as if the world were at stake to get his part of a shoe finished as soon as another man, so as not to clog and balk the whole system, had no time for rebellion.  He was in the whirlpool which was mightier than himself and his revolt.  After all, a man is a small and helpless factor before his own needs.  For a time those whirring machines, which had been evolved in the first place from the brains of men, and partook