Dulac looked at her sharply, calculatingly.  “No,” he said, presently, “you can do a lot more good where you are.”

“Will there be trouble?  I dread to think of rioting and maybe bloodshed.  It will be bad enough, anyhow—­if it lasts long.  The poor women and children!”

“There’ll be trouble if they try to turn a wheel or bring in scab labor.”  He laughed, so that his white teeth showed.  “The first thing they did was to telephone for the police.  I suppose this kid with a whole day’s experience in the business will be calling in strike breakers and strong-arms and gunmen. ...Well, let him bring it down on himself if he wants to.  We’re in this thing to win.  It means unionism breaking into this automobile game.  This is just the entering wedge.”

“Won’t the automobile manufacturers see that, too?” she asked.  “Won’t the men have all their power and wealth to fight?”

Dulac shrugged his shoulders.  “I guess the automobile world knows who Dulac is to-night,” he said, with gleaming eyes.

Somehow the boast became the man.  It was perfectly in character with his appearance, with his bearing.  It did not impress Ruth as a brag; it seemed a natural and ordinary thing for him to say.

“You’ve been here just two weeks,” she said, a trifle breathlessly; for he loomed big to her girlish eyes.  “You’ve done all this in two weeks.”

He received the compliment indifferently.  Perhaps that was a pose; perhaps the ego of the man made him impervious even to compliments.  There are men so confident in their powers that a compliment always falls short of their own estimate of themselves.

“It’s a start—­but all our work is only a start.  It’s preliminary,” His voice became oratorical.  “First we must unionize the world.  Now there are strong unions and weak unions—­both arrayed against a capital better organized and stronger than ever before in the world’s history.  Unionism is primary instruction in revolution.  We must teach labor its power, and it is slow to learn.  We must prepare, prepare, prepare, and when all is ready we shall rise.  Not one union, not the unions of a state, of a country, but the unions of the world...hundreds of millions of men who have been ground down by aristocracies and wealth for generations.  Then we shall have such an overturning as shall make the French Revolution look like child’s play. ...A World’s Republic—­that’s our aim; a World’s Republic ruled by labor!”

Her eyes glistened as he talked; she could visualize his vision, could see a united world, cleansed of wars, of boundary lines; a world where every man’s chance of happiness was the equal of every other man’s chance; where wealth and poverty were abolished, from which slums, degradation, starvation, the sordid wickednesses compelled by poverty, should have vanished.  She could see a world of peace, plenty, beauty.

It was for this high aim that Dulac worked.  His stature increased.  She marveled that such a man could waste his thoughts upon her.  She idealized him; her soul prostrated itself before him.