“We can’t blame them for wanting to earn a living, Miss Vance,” said Conrad.

“No, no!  I don’t blame them.  Who am I, to do such a thing?  It’s we—­people like me, of my class—­who make the poor betray one another.  But this dreadful fighting—­this hideous paper is full of it!” She held up an extra, crumpled with her nervous reading.  “Can’t something be done to stop it?  Don’t you think that if some one went among them, and tried to make them see how perfectly hopeless it was to resist the companies and drive off the new men, he might do some good?  I have wanted to go and try; but I am a woman, and I mustn’t!  I shouldn’t be afraid of the strikers, but I’m afraid of what people would say!” Conrad kept pressing his handkerchief to the cut in his temple, which he thought might be bleeding, and now she noticed this.  “Are you hurt, Mr. Dryfoos?  You look so pale.”

“No, it’s nothing—­a little scratch I’ve got.”

“Indeed, you look pale.  Have you a carriage?  How will you get home?  Will you get in here with me and let me drive you?”

“No, no,” said Conrad, smiling at her excitement.  “I’m perfectly well—­”

“And you don’t think I’m foolish and wicked for stopping you here and talking in this way?  But I know you feel as I do!”

“Yes, I feel as you do.  You are right—­right in every way—­I mustn’t keep you—­Good-bye.”  He stepped back to bow, but she put her beautiful hand out of the window, and when he took it she wrung his hand hard.

“Thank you, thank you!  You are good and you are just!  But no one can do anything.  It’s useless!”

The type of irreproachable coachman on the box whose respectability had suffered through the strange behavior of his mistress in this interview drove quickly off at her signal, and Conrad stood a moment looking after the carriage.  His heart was full of joy; it leaped; he thought it would burst.  As he turned to walk away it seemed to him as if he mounted upon the air.  The trust she had shown him, the praise she had given him, that crush of the hand:  he hoped nothing, he formed no idea from it, but it all filled him with love that cast out the pain and shame he had been suffering.  He believed that he could never be unhappy any more; the hardness that was in his mind toward his father went out of it; he saw how sorely he had tried him; he grieved that he had done it, but the means, the difference of his feeling about the cause of their quarrel, he was solemnly glad of that since she shared it.  He was only sorry for his father.  “Poor father!” he said under his breath as he went along.  He explained to her about his father in his reverie, and she pitied his father, too.