ouble. He dimly sansed her
suffering, without comprehending the scope and intensity of it. He was
too man-practical, and, by his very sex, too remote from the intimate
tragedy that was hers. He was an outsider at the best, a friendly
onlooker who saw little. To her the baby had been quick and real. It was
still quick and real. That was her trouble. By no deliberate effort of
will could she fill the aching void of its absence. Its reality became,
at times, an hallucination. Somewhere it still was, and she must find
it. She would catch herself, on occasion, listening with strained ears
for the cry she had never heard, yet which, in fancy, she had heard a
thousand times in the happy months before the end. Twice she left her
bed in her sleep and went searching--each time coming to herself beside
her mother's chest of drawers in which were the tiny garments. To
herself, at such moments, she would say, "I had a baby once." And she
would say it, aloud, as she watched the children playing in the street.

One day, on the Eighth street cars, a young mother sat beside her, a
crowing infant in her arms. And Saxon said to her:

"I had a baby once. It died."

The mother looked at her, startled, half-drew the baby tighter in her
arms, jealously, or as if in fear; then she softened as she said:

"You poor thing."

"Yes," Saxon nodded. "It died."

Tear's welled into her eyes, and the telling of her grief seemed to have
brought relief. But all the day she suffered from an almost overwhelming
desire to recite her sorrow to the world--to the paying teller at the
bank, to the elderly floor-walker in Salinger's, to the blind woman,
guided by a little boy, who played on the concertina--to every one save
the policeman. The police were new and terrible creatures to her now.
She had seen them kill the strikers as mercilessly as the strikers had
killed the scabs. And, unlike the strikers, the police were professional
killers. They were not fighting for jobs. They did it as a business.
They could have taken prisoners that day, in the angle of her front
steps and the house. But they had not. Unconsciously, whenever
approaching one, she edged across the sidewalk so as to get as far
as possible away from him. She did not reason it out, but deeper than
consciousness was the feeling that they were typical of something
inimical to her and hers.

At Eighth and Broadway, waiting for her car to return home, the
policeman on the corner recognized he