ision of power. The line was
too fine, too fluctuating. One or the other must lose. Talk of
concessions, of improvement of conditions, only obscured the issue. She
put herself momentarily in the place of the employers, the men of her
class, the men she knew: and her jaw hardened. Freedom was the essence
of American life. She would never permit those who took her bread to
dictate what and how she should give it. She would fight to the end for
her freedom.

Then, resolutely, she put herself in the place of those who demanded
that she yield that freedom. Unconsciously her fingers clenched. She saw
quite clearly that "freedom" took on a different meaning then. It became
"tyranny." These creatures who came up out of the earth to burn and
destroy, who flouted law and the rights of property, were but fragments
of mankind's never-ending fight for liberty. Though, in their groping
progress toward the goal, they wallowed in blood and folly, destroying
the good with the bad, murdering the saints with the sinners, none the
less were they a part of the blundering march of democracy.

Algoma was but an outpost of a struggle that was universal. The crust of
convention and pretence had burst through momentarily, and the seething
cauldron, full of the molten future, was exposed to frightened eyes.

As the hours passed, a new point of view took form in Judith's mind, and
things which had always been quite clear now seemed not clear at all.
She had never been more thoroughly muddled in her life, but she realised
with a sense of satisfaction that the very confusion of her mind
indicated the wiping away of those specious answers to all questions
which had been an absolute preventive against any real speculation. Her
slate was blank. There was room for new writing.

But over and over again recurred the question, "Why don't people think
about these things?" She wanted to rush out and wipe the slates of her
friends clear of their comfortable sophistries. She wanted to make them
understand that because a man preached change he was not as dangerous as
the man who preached inaction when there was a volcano under their feet.
Why must they always destroy their Cassandras?

She was at a pitch of exaltation which she had seldom attained before
when John Baker, the most phlegmatic person she knew, was announced.

He greeted her seriously, as he greeted everyone, and accomplished the
conversational preliminaries in the fewest possible words. Then