als.

Everywhere was manifest a pinching and scraping, a tightning and
shortening down of expenditure. And everywhere was more irritation.
Women became angered with one another, and with the children, more
quickly than of yore; and Saxon knew that Bert and Mary bickered
incessantly.

"If she'd only realize I've got troubles of my own," Bert complained to
Saxon.

She looked at him closely, and felt fear for him in a vague, numb way.
His black eyes seemed to burn with a continuous madness. The brown face
was leaner, the skin drawn tightly across the cheekbones. A slight twist
had come to the mouth, which seemed frozen into bitterness. The
very carriage of his body and the way he wore his hat advertised a
recklessness more intense than had been his in the past.

Sometimes, in the long afternoons, sitting by the window with
idle hands, she caught herself reconstructing in her vision that
folk-migration of her people across the plains and mountains and deserts
to the sunset land by the Western sea. And often she found herself
dreaming of the arcadian days of her people, when they had not lived in
cities nor been vexed with labor unions and employers' associations. She
would remember the old people's tales of self-sufficingness, when they
shot or raised their own meat, grew their own vegetables, were their
own blacksmiths and carpenters, made their own shoes--yes, and spun
the cloth of the clothes they wore. And something of the wistfulness
in Tom's face she could see as she recollected it when he talked of his
dream of taking up government land.

A farmer's life must be fine, she thought. Why was it that people had to
live in cities? Why had times changed? If there had been enough in the
old days, why was there not enough now? Why was it necessary for men
to quarrel and jangle, and strike and fight, all about the matter of
getting work? Why wasn't there work for all?--Only that morning, and she
shuddered with the recollection, she had seen two scabs, on their way to
work, beaten up by the strikers, by men she knew by sight, and some by
name, who lived in the neighhorhood. It had happened directly across the
street. It had been cruel, terrible--a dozen men on two. The children
had begun it by throwing rocks at the scabs and cursing them in ways
children should not know. Policemen had run upon the scene with drawn
revolvers, and the strikers had retreated into the houses and through
the narrow alleys between the houses.