if, after all, this inequality of possessions is not a
part of the system of creation, if the righting of them is not
beyond the flaming sword of the Garden of Eden? I wonder if the one
who tries to right them forcibly is not meddling, and usurping the
part of the Creator, and bringing down wrath and confusion not only
upon his own head, but upon the heads of others? I wonder if it is
wise, in order to establish a principle, to make those who have no
voice in the matter suffer for it--the helpless women and children?"
She even thought with a sort of scornful sympathy of Sadie Peel,
who could not have her nearseal cape, and had not wished to strike.
She reflected, as she had done so many times before, that the world
was very old--thousands of years old--and inequality was as old as
the world. Might it not even be a condition of its existence, the
shifting of weights which kept it to its path in the scheme of the
universe? And yet always she went back to her firm belief that the
strikers were right, and always, although she loved Robert Lloyd,
she denounced him. Even when it came to her abandoning her position
with regard to the strike, she had not the slightest thought of
effecting thereby a reconciliation with Robert.

For the first time, that night when she had gone to bed, after
announcing her determination to go back to work, she questioned her
affection for Robert. Before she had always admitted it to herself
with a sort of shamed and angry dignity. "Other women feel so about
men, and why should I not?" she had said; "and I shall never fail to
keep the feeling behind more important things." She had accepted
the fact of it with childlike straightforwardness as she accepted
all other facts of life, and now she wondered if she really did care
for him so much. She thought over and over everything Abby had said,
and saw plainly before her mental vision those poor women parting
with their cherished possessions, the little starving children
snatching at the refuse-buckets at the neighbors' back doors. She
saw with incredulous shame, and something between pity and scorn,
Mamie Bemis, who had gone wrong, and Mamie Brady, who had taken her
foolish, ill-balanced life in her own hands. She remembered every
word which she had said to the men on the morning of the strike, and
how they had started up and left their machines. "I did it all," she
told herself. "I am responsible for it all--all this suffering, for
those hungry lit