to stop all work upon Highcourt and go abroad again
for the sake of economy. Why should she be made uncomfortable, just
because Archie had been foolish about investments and felt hard up? So
they had some words, and Archie went oftener than ever to San Francisco,
frequently staying in the city for days at a time, which was bad for
Adelle's fortune, had she but realized it. But, as has been shown, she
had come now to the time when she felt relieved if Archie was not at
home, glum and sulky, or nagging and fighting her will. With the place
and her boy she had enough to fill her mind, and easily forgot all money
troubles when Archie was not there to remind her of them. Somehow they
raised the money for the workmen, and the building went on, more slowly.

XXXV

The workmen at Highcourt were of the nondescript labor army that America
has recruited. For the rougher outside work there were a number of
Italians, whom Adelle liked to entertain with her tourist Italian. There
were also a few Greeks and Slavs who had got into this kind of work from
other occupations. Inside the house the carpenters, painters, and
plumbers were Swedes, Finns, Germans, one Englishman--no one who might
justly be described as a native American. It was a typical instance of
the way in which all the hard, rough labor of the country was being
done, from building railroads to getting out the timber from the forests
or making shoes and blankets in the factories. Hard physical labor was
no longer performed to any extent by native Americans. Contractors
everywhere recruited their polyglot companies in the great cities and
shipped them out into the country where there was a demand. The men
employed at Highcourt were thus obtained in San Francisco by the head
contractor and merely boarded in the town of Bellevue. They lived
"across the tracks" in the labor settlement, or in lath and tar-paper
shacks about the hills, camping in their eternal campaign of day labor
wherever the job happened to take them. Few were married, and all were
given more or less to drink and riotous living when pay-day came; and of
course they were constantly changing jobs. Adelle often heard the
architect and the head contractor deplore the conditions of the labor
market and the poor quality of work to be got out of the men at ruinous
wages. She had also heard her neighbors, Carter Pound and Nelson
Carhart, speak feelingly about the "foreign riff-raff" they had to
employ on the