“What can your committee do?” demanded one of the strike leaders, passionately—­it was Findley.  “If you find one party wrong, can your state force it to do right?  Can you legislators be impartial when you have not lived the bitter life of the workers?  Would you arbitrate a question of life and death?  And are the worst wages paid in these mills anything short of death?  Do you investigate because conditions are bad? or because the workers broke loose and struck?  Why did you not come before the strike?”

This drew more approval from the rear.  Why, indeed?  The Chairman was adroit, he had pulled himself out of many tight places in the Assembly Chamber, but now he began to perspire, to fumble in his coat tails for a handkerchief.  The Legislature, he maintained, could not undertake to investigate such matters until called to its attention....

Later on a tall gentleman, whom heaven had not blessed with tact, saw fit to deplore the violence that had occurred; he had no doubt the leaders of the strike regretted it as much as he, he was confident it would be stopped, when public opinion would be wholly and unreservedly on the side of the strikers.

“Public opinion!” savagely cried Lindtzki, who spoke English with only a slight accent.  “If your little boy, if your little girl come to you and ask for shoes, for bread, and you say, `I have no shoes, I have no bread, but public opinion is with us,’ would that satisfy you?”

This drew so much applause that the tall law-maker sat down again with a look of disgust on his face....  The Committee withdrew, and for many weeks thereafter the state they represented continued to pay some four thousand dollars daily to keep its soldiers on the streets of Hampton....

In the meanwhile Janet saw much of Rolfe.  Owing to his facile command of language he was peculiarly fitted to draft those proclamations, bombastically worded in the French style, issued and circulated by the Strike Committee—­appeals to the polyglot army to withstand the pangs of hunger, to hold out for the terms laid down, assurances that victory was at hand.  Walking up and down the bibliotheque, his hands behind his back, his red lips gleaming as he spoke, he dictated these documents to Janet.  In the ecstasy of this composition he had a way of shaking his head slowly from side to side, and when she looked up she saw his eyes burning, down at her.  A dozen times a day, while she was at her other work, he would come in and talk to her.  He excited her, she was divided between attraction and fear of him, and often she resented his easy assumption that a tie existed between them—­the more so because this seemed to be taken for granted among certain of his associates.  In their eyes, apparently, she was Rolfe’s recruit in more senses than one.  It was indeed a strange society in which she found herself, and Rolfe typified it.  He lived on the plane of the impulses and intellect, discarded as