She looked at him doubtfully, her cheeks glowing, her eyes like stars.  She was freedom and youth incarnate, and rebellious against all which she conceived as wrong and tyrannical.  She could hardly admit, in her fire of enthusiasm, of pure indignation, of any compromise or arbitration.  All the griefs of her short life, she had told herself, were directly traceable to the wrongs of the system of labor and capital, and were awakening within her as freshly as if they had just happened.

She remembered her father, exiled in his prime from his place in the working world by this system of arbitrary employment; she remembered her aunt in the asylum; poor little Amabel; her own mother toiling beyond her strength on underpaid work; Maria coughing her life away.  She remembered her own life twisted into another track from the one which she should have followed, and there was for the time very little reason or justice in her.  That injustice which will arise to meet its kind in equal combat had arisen in her heart.  Still, she yielded.  “Perhaps you are right,” she said to Sargent.  She had always liked John Sargent, and she respected him.

“I am sure it is the best course,” he said to her, still in that low, confidential voice.

It ended in a committee of four—­John Sargent, Amos Lee, Tom Peel, and one of the older lasters, a very respectable man, a deacon in the Baptist Church—­being appointed to wait on Robert Lloyd that evening.

When the one-o’clock whistle blew, Ellen went back to her machine.  She was very pale, but she was conscious of a curious steadiness of all her nerves.  Abby leaned towards her, and spoke low in the roar of wheels.

“I’ll back you up, if I die for it,” she said.

But Sadie Peel, on the other side, spoke quite openly, with a laugh and shrug of her shoulders.  “Land,” she said, “father’ll be with you.  He’s bound to strike.  He struck when he was in McGuire’s.  Catch father givin’ up anything.  But as for me, I wish you’d all slow up an’ stick to work, if you do get a little less.  If we quit work I can’t have a nearseal cape, and I’ve set my heart on a nearseal cape this winter.”

Chapter LII

Ellen resolved that she would say as little as possible about the trouble at home that night.  She did not wish her parents to worry over it until it was settled in one way or another.

When her mother asked what they had done about the wage-cutting, she replied that a committee had been appointed to wait on Mr. Lloyd that evening, and talk it over with him; then she said nothing more.

“He won’t give in if he’s like his uncle,” said Fanny.

Ellen went on eating her supper in silence.  Her father glanced at her with sharp solicitude.

“Maybe he will,” said he.

“No, he won’t,” returned Fanny.

Ellen was very pale and her eyes were bright.  After supper she went to the window and pressed her face against the glass, shielding her eyes from the in-door light, and saw that the storm had quite ceased.  The stars were shining and the white boughs of the trees lashing about in the northwest wind.  She went into the entry, where she had hung her hat and coat, and began putting them on.