“Oh, thrashing ’round, trying to connect with life—­she’s one of the unfortunate unemployed.”

“Unemployed?”

“The idle rich,” he explained.  “Perhaps you can give her a job—­enlist her in the I.W.W.”

“We don’t want that kind,” Janet declared.

“Have pity on her,” he begged.  “Nobody wants them—­that’s why they’re so pathetic.”

She accompanied him up the narrow stairway to a great loft, the bareness of which had been tempered by draped American flags.  From the trusses of the roof hung improvised electric lights, and the children were already seated at the four long tables, where half a dozen ladies were supplying them with enamelled bowls filled with steaming soup.  They attacked it ravenously, and the absence of the talk and laughter that ordinarily accompany children’s feasts touched her, impressed upon her, as nothing else had done, the destitution of the homes from which these little ones had come.  The supplies that came to Hampton, the money that poured into Headquarters were not enough to allay the suffering even now.  And what if the strike should last for months!  Would they be able to hold out, to win?  In this mood of pity, of anxiety mingled with appreciation and gratitude for what this man was doing, she turned to speak to him, to perceive on the platform at the end of the room a lady seated.  So complete was the curve of her back that her pose resembled a letter u set sidewise, the gap from her crossed knee to her face being closed by a slender forearm and hand that held a lorgnette, through which she was gazing at the children with an apparently absorbed interest.  This impression of willowy flexibility was somehow heightened by large, pear-shaped pendants hanging from her ears, by a certain filminess in her black costume and hat.  Flung across the table beside her was a long coat of grey fur.  She struck an odd note here, presented a strange contrast to Janet’s friend from Silliston, with his rough suit and fine but rugged features.

“I’m sorry I haven’t a table for you just at present,” he was saying.  “But perhaps you’ll let me take your order,”—­and he imitated the obsequious attitude of a waiter.  “A little fresh caviar and a clear soup, and then a fish—?”

The lady took down her lorgnette and raised an appealing face.

“You’re always joking, Brooks,” she chided him, “even when you’re doing things like this!  I can’t get you to talk seriously even when I come all the way from New York to find out what’s going on here.”

“How hungry children eat, for instance?” he queried.

“Dear little things, it’s heartrending!” she exclaimed.  “Especially when I think of my own children, who have to be made to eat.  Tell me the nationality of that adorable tot at the end.”

“Perhaps Miss Bumpus can tell you,” he ventured.  And Janet, though distinctly uncomfortable and hostile to the lady, was surprised and pleased that he should have remembered her name.  “Brooks,” she had called him.  That was his first name.  This strange and sumptuous person seemed intimate with him.  Could it be possible that he belonged to her class?  “Mrs. Brocklehurst, Miss Bumpus.”