their strike,
that the "Imperial" was succeeding in securing reliable non-union help,
and she longed to send Hertha out to redeem the situation. Perhaps her
confidence in her new friend was excessive, certainly she exaggerated
her activity at the walkout, but she knew that a shy, attractive girl,
without ambition for position, could sometimes wield a greater influence
than the best organizer. Only the shy girl would so seldom use her
power.

"A strike," she said, putting down her soup-spoon, "a strike is the one
power the lords of the universe, meaning the capitalists, leave us. They
can take away fresh air and sunlight, they can rob us of our childhood
like they done me when I was a little girl in the country up-state, but
they can't make us work. If I stop, and the rest of the workers stop
with me, it's starvation for the world until we start to work again."

"Did you live in the country when you were a child?" Hertha asked,
interested at once.

"That I did," Kathleen answered.

"Didn't you love it? The sky is so big in the country--you get such
miserable smoky patches here--and there are great stretches of earth.
You feel like running with your arms thrown out and singing; and while
you're feeling the air and the sky and the big things you look down at
your feet and see the little spring flowers."

"Is it like that?" asked Kathleen. "Do you know I hardly remember it."

"Did you leave when you were so young?"

"Eleven."

"But, Kathleen----"

"The sky and air and flowers were dear where I lived, they were only for
the rich. For a little girl like me, who slaved in the factory from sun
to sun, they were luxuries that came Sundays and holidays and that she
was too weary to enjoy."

"At work in the factory at eleven?"

"I worked when I was eight. I remember how my teacher looked when she
met me one Sunday and asked why I didn't come to school. I told her my
mother had put me to work in the cotton mill. 'It's a sin,' she said and
the tears in her eyes. And then she went on to tell how I was her best
pupil, and my mother must leave me with her. But that was all come of
it, just words. Words from her and the mill for me."

Hertha was silent; but she pictured a little girl, with clear gray eyes
and bright hair, holding her thumb tight on her book while she read from
its pages, or playing tag at recess; and again, sober, tired-eyed,
walking slowly in the twilight back from the factory to her home. "I
didn't kno