Ellen had not arrived at her decision with regard to the strike as suddenly as it may have seemed.  All winter, ever since the strike, Ellen had been wondering, not whether the principle of the matter was correct or not, that she never doubted; she never swerved in her belief concerning the cruel tyranny of the rich and the helpless suffering of the poor, and their good reason for making a stand, but she doubted more and more the wisdom of it.  She used to sit for hours up in her chamber after her father and mother had gone to bed, wrapped up in an old shawl against the cold, resting her elbows on the window-sill and her chin on her two hands, staring out into the night, and reflecting.  Her youthful enthusiasm carried her like a leaping-pole to conclusions beyond her years.  “I wonder,” she said to herself, “if, after all, this inequality of possessions is not a part of the system of creation, if the righting of them is not beyond the flaming sword of the Garden of Eden?  I wonder if the one who tries to right them forcibly is not meddling, and usurping the part of the Creator, and bringing down wrath and confusion not only upon his own head, but upon the heads of others?  I wonder if it is wise, in order to establish a principle, to make those who have no voice in the matter suffer for it—­the helpless women and children?” She even thought with a sort of scornful sympathy of Sadie Peel, who could not have her nearseal cape, and had not wished to strike.  She reflected, as she had done so many times before, that the world was very old—­thousands of years old—­and inequality was as old as the world.  Might it not even be a condition of its existence, the shifting of weights which kept it to its path in the scheme of the universe?  And yet always she went back to her firm belief that the strikers were right, and always, although she loved Robert Lloyd, she denounced him.  Even when it came to her abandoning her position with regard to the strike, she had not the slightest thought of effecting thereby a reconciliation with Robert.

For the first time, that night when she had gone to bed, after announcing her determination to go back to work, she questioned her affection for Robert.  Before she had always admitted it to herself with a sort of shamed and angry dignity.  “Other women feel so about men, and why should I not?” she had said; “and I shall never fail to keep the feeling behind more important things.”  She had accepted the fact of it with childlike straightforwardness as she accepted all other facts of life, and now she wondered if she really did care for him so much.  She thought over and over everything Abby had said, and saw plainly before her mental vision those poor women parting with their cherished possessions, the little starving children snatching at the refuse-buckets at the neighbors’ back doors.  She saw with incredulous shame, and something between pity and scorn, Mamie Bemis, who had gone wrong, and Mamie Brady, who