"You want a better life, don't you?" he said. "You want to enjoy more, and know more and be more. And the people who can individually get these things by your toil you are set against.... But what are you working for? Food and clothes and a little fun? And your own children? I say that those of you who are working just for these things for yourselves are almost as bad as those who work for their own luxury.... What then? What are we working for? Why, to make the world where _all of us_ can have a better life, and enjoy more, and know more, and be more. And we've got to do this together. And those of us who are not trying to raise the standard for _all of us_, whether employers or employees, are all outlaws together." It was wonderful to see how he faced that audience of tired men and women, and kindled them into human beings. It was wonderful to see the hope and then the belief and then the courage come quickening in their eyes, in their faces, in their applause. Afterward they went forward like one person to meet him, to take his hand. While they were with him, they became one person. It was almost as if they became, before his eyes, what he was there to tell them that they could go toward. I had meant to slip out of the hall afterward. The last thing that I had meant to do was to walk down the aisle and put out my hand. Yet when he had finished, that was what I did. "You liked it?" he said to me. "I know it!" I told him. "Ah, that's it," he answered. "Wait," he added. So I waited until they had all spoken with him, and I wondered how any one could watch them and not understand them. One girl, new in the factory, came to him: "Now you have showed me where I belong in my little life," she said to him in broken English. "Before, I felt as if I had been born and then somebody had walked away and left me there. Now I see where I am, after all." Afterward, Rose came to me, and her face was new. "If only we could keep them where they are now," she said. "But when they get hungry once, they forget it all." Mr. Ember and I went down to the street. "Don't you want to walk home?" he said to me. And when we had left the push-carts and the noise, he turned to me in the still street: "Now tell me?" he said. "How do you know those girls so well?" I answered in genuine surprise. It seemed to me he must know. "You!" he exclaimed. "Worked in a factory? At what? And when?" I told him some of the things that I had done. He listened, and had no idea in the world that it was he who began it all for me. He smiled with me at my year with Miss Manners and Miss Spot. "And now what?" he asked. "Now I'm secretary to you," I reminded him. "You are not," he said, "you're an unpaid slave, being exploited for all you're worth, and you ought to be on strike this minute. Seriously," he added, "I can't go on this way. Don't you see that I can't allow it?"