Part 15 (1/2)

Well, and do you know what the conditions are in every big mill in this town? With this boom in war orders, they've simply taken off the lid.

Anything goes. The fire and building ordinances are disregarded, and for six months the mills have been running a night s.h.i.+ft as well as a day s.h.i.+ft, on Sundays and week-days, and three-quarters of their operatives are women. Those women go to work at seven o'clock at night, and quit at six in the morning; and they have an hour off from twelve to one in the middle of the night.

”Now do you see? It's up to the district attorney to enforce the law.

Isn't it fair to ask this defender of the home whether he believes that women should be home at night or not, and if he does, what he's going to do about it? Talk about slogans! The situation bristles with them!

We could placard this town with a lot of big black-faced questions that would make it the hottest place for George Remington that he ever found himself in.

”Well, it would be pretty good campaign work if he was the hypocrite I took him to be, from his stuff in the _Sentinel_. But if he's on the level, as you think he is, there's a chance--don't you see there's a chance that he'd come out flat-footed for the enforcement of the law?

And if he did!... Child, can you see what would happen if he _did_?”

Betty's eyes were s.h.i.+ning like a pair of big sapphires. When she spoke, it was in a whisper like an excited child.

”I can see a little,” she said. ”I think I can see. But tell me.”

”In the first place,” said E. Eliot, ”see whom he'd have against him.

There'd be the best people, to start with. Most of them are stockholders in the mills. Why, you must be, yourself, in the Jaffry-Bradshaw Company! Your father was, anyway.”

Betty nodded.

”You want to be sure you know what it means,” the older woman went on.

”This thing might cut into your dividends, if it went through.”

”I hope it will,” said Betty fiercely. ”I never realized before that my money was earned like that--by women, girls of my age, standing over a machine all night.” She s.h.i.+vered. ”And there are some of us, I'm sure,”

she went on, ”who would feel the way I do about it.”

”Well,--some,” E. Eliot admitted. ”Not many, though. And then there are the merchants. These are great times for them--town crammed with people, all making money, and buying right and left. And then there's the labor vote itself! A lot of laboring men would be against him. Their women just now are earning as much as they are. There are a lot of these men--whatever they might say--who'd take good care not to vote for a man who would prevent their daughters from bringing in the fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five dollars a week they get for that night work.

”Well, and who would be with him? Why, the women themselves. The one chance on earth he'd have for election would be to have the women organized and working for him, bringing every ounce of influence they had to bear on their men--on all the men they knew.

”Mind you, I don't believe he could win at that. But, win or lose, he'd have done something. He'd have shown the women that they needed the vote, and he'd have found out for himself--he and the other men who believe in fair human treatment for everybody--that they can't secure that treatment without women's votes. That's the real issue. It isn't that women are better than men, or that they could run the world better if they got the chance. It's that men and women have got to work together to do the things that need doing.”

”You're perfectly wonderful,” said Betty, and sat thereafter, for perhaps a minute and a half, in an entranced silence.

Then, with a shake of the head, a straightening of the spine, and a good, deep, business-like preliminary breath, she turned to her new friend and said, ”Well, shall we do it?”

This time it was E. Eliot's turn to gasp.

She hadn't expected to have a course of action put up to her in that instantaneous and almost casual manner. She wasn't young like Betty.

She'd been working hard ever since she was seventeen years old. She'd succeeded, in a way, to be sure. But her success had taught her how hard success is to obtain. She saw much farther into the consequences of the proposed campaign than Betty could see. She realized the bitter animosity that it would provoke. She knew it was well within the probabilities that her business would be ruined by it.

She sat there silent for a while, her face getting grimmer and grimmer all the time. But she turned at last and looked into the eager face of the girl beside her, and she smiled,--though even the smile was grim.

”All right,” she said, holding out her hand to bind the bargain. ”We'll start and we'll stick. And here's hoping! We'd better lunch together, hadn't we?”

CHAPTER VII. BY ANNE O'HAGAN

Mr. Benjamin Doolittle, by profession White-water's leading furniture dealer and funeral director, and by the accident of political fortune the manager of Mr. George Remington's campaign, sat in his candidate's private office, and from time to time restrained himself from hasty speech by the diplomatic and dexterous use of a quid of tobacco.