Dozens of hands were raised.

“I’m twenty-nine!”

“I’m three, mister!”

“I’m forty-one!”

He let them in, one by one, and they clattered up the stairs, as he seized a tiny girl bundled in a dark red muffler and set her on the steps above him.  He smiled at Janet.

“This is my restaurant,” he said.

But she could not answer.  She watched him as he continued to bend over the children, and when the smaller ones wept because they had to wait, he whispered in their ears, astonishing one or two into laughter.  Some ceased crying and clung to him with dumb faith.  And after the chosen hundred had been admitted he turned to her again.

“You allow visitors?”

“Oh dear, yes.  They’d come anyway.  There’s one up there now, a very swell lady from New York—­so swell I don’t know what to say to her.  Talk to her for me.”

“But I shouldn’t know what to say, either,” replied Janet.  She smiled, but she had an odd desire to cry.  “What is she doing here?”

“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.