s river!" She thought him
rather silly.

One evening, however, out of this roaring hive of men and women striving
to feed and clothe and house themselves came a flash of vivid lightning
in the murky sky,--the bomb of the anarchist. That was enough to startle
even the Milly Ridges,--spitting forth its vicious message only a mile
or two from where the very "nicest" people had their homes! The sodden
consciousness of the city awoke in a hideous nightmare of fear. The
newspapers were filled with the ravings of excited ignorance. Nobody
talked of anything else. Horatio declaimed against the ungrateful
dogs,--those "Polack beasts,"--who weren't fit to enjoy all that America
gave them. At dinner parties grave and serious men debated in low tones
the awful deed and its meaning. Even women spoke of the bomb instead of
discussing whether "you could get this at Field's" or "should try
Mandel's." A fearful vision of Anarchy stalked the commonplace streets
and peered into comfortable houses. Milly imagined that somehow those
evil-looking barbarians had got loose from the stockyards and might
descend at any moment upon the defenceless city in a howling mob, as she
had read of their doing in her history books. For the first few days it
was an excitement to venture into the streets at night, even with a
strong male escort. Horatio spoke solemnly, with an aroused
consciousness of citizenship, of "teaching the mob lessons and a
wholesome respect for the law." Then there were the rumors fresh every
hour of plots against leading men and wholesale slaughter by these same
bloodthirsty anarchists, and the theatrical discoveries of the
police--it was a breathless time, when even Milly seized upon the
newspaper of a morning. Then gradually, as the police gathered in the
little band of scapegoats, the tension relaxed: people went to the
celebrated Haymarket to gape at the spot where the crime against society
had taken place....

The excitement flamed up once more when the anarchists were brought to
trial. Women fought for the chance to sit in the noisome little
court-room, to see the eight men caught like rats in the nets of
Justice. When life emerges dramatically in the court-room, it interests
the Milly Ridges.... One morning Sally Norton came flying into the Ridge
house.

"Get your things on, Mil!" she rippled breathlessly. "We're going to the
anarchist trial."

"But the papers say you can't get near the door."

"Father's given me a ca