Would they never wake to the situation?

She watched the election closely.  She knew that if Akers were elected the general strike and the chaos to follow would be held back until he had taken office and made the necessary changes in the city administration, but that if he went down to defeat the Council would turn loose its impatient hordes at once.

She waited for election day with burning anxiety.  When it came it so happened that she was left alone all day in the house.  Early in the morning Olga brought her a tray and told her she was going out.  She was changed, the Russian; she had dropped the mask of sodden servility and stood before her, erect, cunningly intelligent and oddly powerful.

“I am going to be away all day, Mrs. Doyle,” she said, in her excellent English.  “I have work to do.”

“Work?” said Elinor.  “Isn’t there work to do here?”

“I am not a house-worker.  I came to help Mr. Doyle.  To-day I shall make speeches.”

Elinor was playing the game carefully.  “But—­can you make speeches?” she asked.

“Me?  That is my work, here, in Russia, everywhere.  In Russia it is the women who speak, the men who do what the women tell them to do.  Here some day it will be the same.”

Always afterwards Elinor remembered the five minutes that followed, for Olga, standing before her, suddenly burst into impassioned oratory.  She cited the wrongs of the poor under the old regime.  She painted in glowing colors the new.  She was excited, hectic, powerful.  Elinor in her chair, an aristocrat to the finger-tips, was frightened, interested, thrilled.

Long after Olga had gone she sat there, wondering at the real conviction, the intensity of passion, of hate and of revenge that actuated this newest tool of Doyle’s.  Doyle and his associates might be actuated by self-interest, but the real danger in the movement lay not with the Doyles of the world, but with these fanatic liberators.  They preached to the poor a new religion, not of creed or of Church, but of freedom.  Freedom without laws of God or of man, freedom of love, of lust, of time, of all responsibility.  And the poor, weighted with laws and cares, longed to throw off their burdens.

Perhaps it was not the doctrine itself that was wrong.  It was its imposition by force on a world not yet ready for it that was wrong; its imposition by violence.  It might come, but not this way.  Not, God preventing, this way.

There was a polling place across the street, in the basement of a school house.  The vote was heavy and all day men lounged on the pavements, smoking and talking.  Once she saw Olga in the crowd, and later on Louis Akers drove up in an open automobile, handsome, apparently confident, and greeted with cheers.  But Elinor, knowing him well, gained nothing from his face.

Late that night she heard Doyle come in and move about the lower floor.  She knew every emphasis of his walk, and when in the room underneath she heard him settle down to steady, deliberate pacing, she knew that he was facing some new situation, and, after his custom, thinking it out alone.