hat might have been by a cheerful acceptance of
what life offered her. She was the daughter of a tailor, a dark blond
of trustworthy aspect, quietly inclined toward play and fancy, but
contented to express it before the men of her household only as a half
humorous, half melancholy mood. Her father had called her Marie, but
one of his customers, a lieutenant-general, had named her Spiele. She
on her part called her husband, whose real name was Ferdinand, "the
long one," not so much for his bodily length, as for the extent of his
activities, calculations, schemes and unionist controversies, which
sometimes made her lose her breath and her judgment.

At this time Hoeflinger was occupied with the organization of a
laborers' consumers' league. This work frequently called him away and
kept them apart, and though he always returned to her, still she
resented his having been separated from her for a time. In the factory,
too, Hoeflinger occupied a special and independent position: he served
the iron saw, a giant of double a man's height. This had impaired his
hearing; figuratively speaking, you had to use Gothic type in order to
make him understand. On the other hand, this deficiency favored his
tendency to accept the phenomena of life summarily and to survey things
from the organizer's standpoint.

To this couple came a young laborer, Victor Pratteler, who had but
recently stepped out of the narrow, securely guarded realm of hand
labor into the open and surging world of the iron proletariat. He
completely lacked that personal imagination and that subjective
instinct toward his material which make the very soul of the locksmith
and the blacksmith, so that their grasp becomes the servant of a sixth
sense, the sense of form. Pratteler's hand had not groped its way
toward this higher sense, so he employed it where the course of work
goes on abstractly without a will of its own and a predestined process
is watched by a soulless eye and served by a passionless grip. On the
other hand, there survived in Pratteler something of the whimsical mood
of that vanishing social type, the journeyman. He had highfaluting
ideas and pompous movements, and his speech was bloated with
superfluous pathos and personal conceit. His relation to life was a
many-linked chain of demands. Neighbors, both men and women, he looked
upon from the viewpoint of a young steer; the former were either
obstacles or they were bridges and steps leading to the pretty