ittle pleasure in their lives, less even than
men. And wiseacres say we are light and frivolous and chattering, because
most women can only find relief in that and know of nothing else, though
all the time in the bottom of their hearts there are deep wells of human
passion and human love. If you heard sewing-room talk you would call us
parrots or worse. If you knew the sewing-room lives you would feel as I
do."

He did not know what to say.

"For myself," straightening herself with unconscious pride, "it has not
been so much. I have been hungry and almost ragged, here in Sydney,
wearing another girls dress when I went to get slop-work, so as to look
decent, living on rye bread for days at a time, working for thirty-eight
hours at a stretch once so as to get the work done in time to get the
money. That's sweating, isn't it? Of course I'm all right now. I get
thirty shillings a week for draping and the wife of the boss wants to
keep on friendly terms with Mrs. Stratton and I'm a good hand, so I can
organise without being victimised for it. But even when I was hardest up
it wasn't the same to me as to most girls. As a last resort I used to
think always of killing myself. That would have been ever so much easier
to me than the other thing. But I am hard and strong. I've heard my
mother say that her father was the first of his people to wear boots.
They went barefooted before then and I'm barefooted in some things yet.
Mary wasn't like me, but better, not so hard or so selfish. And so, she
couldn't help it, any more than I can."

"Nellie," he said, speaking the thought he had been thinking for an hour.
"What difference does all this make between you and me?"

"Don't you understand?" she cried. "When people marry they have children.
And when my sister Mary ended so, who is safe? Nothing we can do, no care
we can take, can secure a child against misery while the world is what it
is. I try to alter things for that. I would do anything, everything, no
matter what, to make things so that little children would have a chance
to be good and happy. Because the unions go that way I am unionist and
because Socialism means that I am Socialist and I love whatever strikes
at things that are and I hate everything that helps maintain them. And
that is how we all really feel who feel at all, it is the mother in us,
the source of everything that is good, and mothers do not mind much how
their children are bettered so long as they are bette