“Why not?  He’d do it for the cause, wouldn’t he?  Suppose you put it up on him the next time you see him.”

“I don’t see Lindau any more,” said March.  He added, “I guess he’s renounced me along with Mr. Dryfoos’s money.”

“Pshaw!  You don’t mean he hasn’t been round since?”

“He came for a while, but he’s left off coming now.  I don’t feel particularly gay about it,” March said, with some resentment of Fulkerson’s grin.  “He’s left me in debt to him for lessons to the children.”

Fulkerson laughed out.  “Well, he is the greatest old fool!  Who’d ‘a’ thought he’d ‘a’ been in earnest with those ‘brincibles’ of his?  But I suppose there have to be just such cranks; it takes all kinds to make a world.”

“There has to be one such crank, it seems,” March partially assented.  “One’s enough for me.”

“I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too,” said Fulkerson.  “Why, it must act like a schooner of beer on him all the while, to see ‘gabidal’ embarrassed like it is by this strike.  It must make old Lindau feel like he was back behind those barricades at Berlin.  Well, he’s a splendid old fellow; pity he drinks, as I remarked once before.”

When March left the office he did not go home so directly as he came, perhaps because Mrs. March’s eye was not on him.  He was very curious about some aspects of the strike, whose importance, as a great social convulsion, he felt people did not recognize; and, with his temperance in everything, he found its negative expressions as significant as its more violent phases.  He had promised his wife solemnly that he would keep away from these, and he had a natural inclination to keep his promise; he had no wish to be that peaceful spectator who always gets shot when there is any firing on a mob.  He interested himself in the apparent indifference of the mighty city, which kept on about its business as tranquilly as if the private war being fought out in its midst were a vague rumor of Indian troubles on the frontier; and he realized how there might once have been a street feud of forty years in Florence without interfering materially with the industry and prosperity of the city.  On Broadway there was a silence where a jangle and clatter of horse-car bells and hoofs had been, but it was not very noticeable; and on the avenues, roofed by the elevated roads, this silence of the surface tracks was not noticeable at all in the roar of the trains overhead.  Some of the cross-town cars were beginning to run again, with a policeman on the rear of each; on the Third Avenge line, operated by non-union men, who had not struck, there were two policemen beside the driver of every car, and two beside the conductor, to protect them from the strikers.  But there were no strikers in sight, and on Second Avenue they stood quietly about in groups on the corners.  While March watched them at a safe distance, a car laden with policemen came down the track, but none of the strikers offered