“I think he done quite right to quit the strike if he got a chance to work,” Joseph Atkins interposed.  “Folks have got to look out for themselves, labor reform or no labor reform.”

“That’s the corner-stone of labor reform, seems to me,” said Andrew.

“Seems to me sometimes you talk like a damned scab,” cried Nahum Beals, fiercely, red spots flickering in his thin cheeks.  Andrew looked at him, and spoke with slow wrath.  “Look here, Nahum Beals,” he said, “you’re in my house, but I ain’t goin’ to stand no such talk as that, I can tell you.”

John Sargent laid a pacifically detaining hand on Nahum Beals’s arm as he strode past him.  “Oh, Lord, stop rampagin’ up and down like a wildcat,” he said.  “What good do you think you’re doin’ tearin’ and shoutin’ and insultin’ people?  He ain’t talkin’ like a scab, he’s only talkin’ a tie to your string-piece.”

“That’s so,” said Joseph Atkins.  Sargent boarded with him, and the board money was a godsend to him, now he was out of work.  John Sargent had fixed his own price, and it was an unheard-of one for such simple fare as he had.  His weekly dollars kept the whole poor family in food.  But John Sargent was a bachelor, and earning remarkably good wages, and Joseph Atkins’s ailing wife, whom illness and privation had made unnaturally grasping and ungrateful, told her cronies that it wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford it.

Up-stairs little Ellen lay in her bed, her doll in her arms, listening to the low rumble of masculine voices in the room below.  Her mother had gone out, and there were only the men there.  They were smoking, and the odor of their pipes floated up into Ellen’s chamber through the door-cracks.  She thought how her grandmother Brewster would sniff when she came in next day.  She could hear her saying, “Well, for my part, if those men couldn’t smoke their old pipes somewhere else besides in my sittin’-room, I wouldn’t have ’em in the house.”  But that reflection did not trouble Ellen very long, and she had never been disturbed herself by the odor of the pipes.  She thought of them insensibly as the usual atmosphere when men were gathered together in any place except the church.  She knew that they were talking about that old trouble, and Nahum Beals’s voice of high wrath made her shrink; but, after all, she was removed from it all that night into a little prospective paradise of her own, which, as is the case in childhood, seemed to overgild her own future and all the troubles of the world.  Christmas was only a week distant, she was to have a tree, and the very next evening her mother had promised to take her down-town and show her the beautiful, lighted Christmas shops.  She wondered, listening to that rumble of discontent below, why grown-up men and women ever fretted when they were at liberty to go down-town every evening when they chose and look at the lighted shops, for she could still picture pure delight for others without envy or bitterness.