of her interests to a different set of facts.  She was both too busy and too aroused to be sensitive about running water and the minor comforts.  Her whole being was engrossed in large activities, and she found with astonishment how many things she could do without.  What previously had seemed so important, poetry, music, dress, quiet, ease, now became little things lost in a host of new big events.  And, curiously enough, she found a new happiness in this freedom from superfluities—­a sense of range and independence new to her.  For at this time such things actually were superfluous, though the time was to come again when music and poetry had a new and heightened meaning.

But during these days of the strike she was a quite free woman, snatching her sleep and her food carelessly, and putting in her time in spending heart and soul on the problem in hand.  She dressed simply, in shirtwaist and skirt, and she moved among the people as if she were one of them, and with no sense of contrast.  In fact, Myra was changing, changing rapidly.  Her work called for a new set of powers, and without hesitation these new powers rose within her, emerged and became a part of her character.  She became executive, quick, stepped into any situation that confronted her, knew when to be mild, when to be sharp, sensed where sympathy was needed, and also where sympathy merely softened and ruined.  Her face, too, followed this inner change.  Soft lines merged into something more vivid.  She was usually pale, and her sweet, small mouth had a weary droop, but her eyes were keen and living, and lit with vital force.

She began to see that a life of ease and a life of extreme toil were both equally bad—­that each choked off possibilities.  She knew then that women of her type walked about with hidden powers unused, their lives narrowed and blighted, negative people who only needed some great test, some supreme task, to bring out those hidden forces, which, gushing through the soul, overflowing, would make of them characters of abounding vitality.  She felt the glory of men and women who go about the world bubbling over with freshness and zest and life, warming the lives they move among, spreading by quick contagion their faith and virility.  She longed to be such a person—­to train herself in that greatest of all the arts—­the touching of other lives, drawing a music from long-disused heart-strings, rekindling, reanimating, the torpid spirit.  It was her search for more life—­richer, thicker, happier, more intense.

Her model was Joe’s mother.  It seemed to her that Joe’s mother had met life and conquered it, and so would never grow old.  She never found the older woman soured or bitter or enfeebled.  Even about death there was no flinching.

“Don’t you think I know,” said Joe’s mother, “that there is something precious in me that isn’t going to go with the body?  Just look at this body!  That’s just what’s happening already!  I’m too young to die.  And besides I know one or two people whom I lost years ago—­too precious to be lost—­I’ve faith in them.”