back breaking toil of all these poor men and women; and now he was
going to abuse his power of capital, his power to take the bread out
of their mouths entirely, by taking it out in part. He was going to
reduce their wages, he was deliberately going to cause privation,
and even suffering where there were large families. She felt the
most unqualified dissent and indignation, and all the love which she
had for the man only intensified it. Love, with a girl like this,
tended to clearness of vision instead of blindness. She judged him
as she would have judged herself. As she stood working at her
machine, stitching linings to vamps, she kept a sharply listening
ear for what went on about her, but there was very little to hear
after work had fairly commenced and the great place was in full hum.
The demand of labor was so imperative that the laborers themselves
were merged in it; they ceased to be for the time, and, instead of
living, they became parts of the struggle for life. A man hustling
as if the world were at stake to get his part of a shoe finished as
soon as another man, so as not to clog and balk the whole system,
had no time for rebellion. He was in the whirlpool which was
mightier than himself and his revolt. After all, a man is a small
and helpless factor before his own needs. For a time those whirring
machines, which had been evolved in the first place from the brains
of men, and partook in a manner of both the spirit and the grosser
elements of existence, its higher qualities and its sordid
mechanism, like man himself, had the best of it. The swart arms of
the workmen flew at their appointed tasks, they fed those
unsatisfied maws, the factory vibrated with the heavy thud of the
cutting-machines like a pulse, the racks with shoes in different
stages of completion trundled from one department to another,
propelled by men with tense arms and doggedly bent heads.

Ellen worked with the rest, but she was one of the few whose brain
could travel faster than her hands. She thought as she worked, for
her muscles did not retard her mind. She was composed of two
motions, one within the other, and the central motion was so swift
that it seemed still.

Ed Flynn came down the room and bent over her.

"Good-morning," he said. He was too gayly confident to be entirely
respectful, but he had always a timidity of bearing which sat oddly
upon him before Ellen. He looked half boldly, half wistfully at her
fair face, and chall