Lily’s resentment left her. Anger was
a thing for small matters, trivial affairs.
This that was happening, an irrevocable break with
her family, was as far beyond anger as it was beyond
tears. She wondered dully if any man were worth
all this. Perhaps she knew, sub-consciously,
that Louis Akers was not. All her exaltation
was gone, and in its stead was a sort of dogged determination
to see the thing through now, at any cost; to re-make
Louis into the man he could be, to build her own house
of life, and having built it, to live in it as best
she could.
“That is a condition I cannot fulfill, mother.
I am engaged to him.”
“Then you love him more than you do any of us,
or all of us.”
“I don’t know. It is different,”
she said vaguely.
She kissed her mother very tenderly when she went
away, but there was a feeling of finality in them
both. Mademoiselle, waiting at the top of the
stairs, heard the door close and could not believe
her ears. Grace went upstairs, her face a blank
before the servants, and shut herself in her room.
And in Lily’s boudoir the roses spread a heavy,
funereal sweetness over the empty room.
The strike had been carried on with comparatively
little disorder. In some cities there had been
rioting, but half-hearted and easily controlled.
Almost without exception it was the foreign and unassimilated
element that broke the peace. Alien women spat
on the state police, and flung stones at them.
Here and there property was destroyed. A few
bomb outrages filled the newspapers with great scare-heads,
and sent troops and a small army of secret service
men here and there.
In the American Federation of Labor a stocky little
man grimly fought to oppose the Radical element, which
was slowly gaining ground, and at the same time to
retain his leadership. The great steel companies,
united at last by a common danger and a common fate
if they yielded, stood doggedly and courageously together,
waiting for a return of sanity to the world.
The world seemed to have gone mad. Everywhere
in the country production was reduced by the cessation
of labor, and as a result the cost of living was mounting.
And every strike lost in the end. Labor had
yet to learn that to cease to labor may express a
grievance, but that in itself it righted no wrongs.
Rather, it turned that great weapon, public opinion,
without which no movement may succeed, against it.
And that to stand behind the country in war was not
enough. It must stand behind the country in
peace.
It had to learn, too, that a chain is only as strong
as its weakest link. The weak link in the labor
chain was its Radical element. Rioters were arrested
with union cards in their pockets. In vain the
unions protested their lack of sympathy with the unruly
element. The vast respectable family of union
labor found itself accused of the sins of the minority,
and lost standing thereby.
