Almost every day some of the pickets were arrested and sent to the workhouse. But others always volunteered to take their places. There is no surer lesson to be learned from history than that persecution is like oil to the flame of enthusiasm. Instead of breaking, as the bosses--with the fatuousness of Nero--had hoped, the picket became more intense and more effective. The bosses decided that "something decisive must be done." There were several conferences--very quiet and orderly they were--with the expert strike-breakers who had been loaned to them by the Employers' Association. A long statement was prepared, which informed the public that the vest manufacturers, feeling that they were not getting sufficient assistance from the city police, had employed a private detective agency to protect their property and the lives of their faithful employees from the outrages of the strikers. All the English papers published this statement without any inquiry as to whether life and property needed special protection. The more complaisant ones published the stories which the "press agent" of the association furnished on the "outrages." So the impression was spread abroad that the striking vest-makers were smoky-haired furies, who brawled in the streets and tore the clothes off respectable women. But there was hardly any one who had ever been involved in a strike, employer or employed, hardly a cub-reporter in the city, who did not know what this announcement meant. The bosses had failed to break the strike by "legal" means. The "private detectives" had been called in to do it by intimidation and brutality. Girls began coming into the strike headquarters with bleeding faces, with black and blue bruises from kicks. No justice of the Supreme Court has handed down a decision on the probability of the public peace being disturbed by the use of thugs, calling themselves "private detectives," in labor disputes. Mabel, realizing Yetta's special usefulness as a speaker and money-raiser, tried to persuade her that this other work was more important than picketing. "No," Yetta said. "If I didn't spend the morning with the girls, I would not have anything to say at night." Mabel did not urge her further; she no longer called her _la petite_ when she spoke of her to Eleanor. Every one who came in contact with her during these weeks knew that she was growing very rapidly into womanhood. Yetta expected to get arrested. Why should she not? In a way she had started all the trouble. Why should the other girls be knocked about by the ruffian private detectives and she escape? Day after day she took her post before one or another of the vest shops and did her duty as she saw it, as the other women were doing it. There were always two pickets at each post, and it was in these morning watches that Yetta got her deepest insight into the lives of her comrades.