How hard I tried to adjust my new relationship to the ideal which had previously been mine, and at the same time comply with the rules of the company, I will not say. For a time I did manage to keep a cheerful attitude and to speak gently. I tried to overlook the indifference and subterfuge which I knew they were practicing and which before, in part at least, had seemed justifiable but which must also in part be overcome, if life were to go on at all. For Nature, as I had come to see, had established these inequalities, the smallness of mind in some, the strength and vision in others. Who was I to set about establishing exact justice or equation, where I had not created? Or how or where? Or I might smile and smile and urge with pleasant compliments, but how did that justify or make amends? And although for a time it seemed as though I might succeed in avoiding all difficulty, still the memory of my own recent feelings was too fresh not to influence me deeply. Then came a day when the pressure of work to be done was so much greater than it had been before that the usual subterfuge of the men became an irritation to me. They were painfully and exasperatingly slow, if not without reason, and the pressure on me from above was heavy also. A heavy rain had washed the earth into a long trench which we had been excavating. It was necessary to hurry the reopening of this in order not to delay other work. Concrete had to be prepared, a large foundation set by a given date. We were under urgent surveillance from our superiors and could but follow out their orders or resign. In this situation I confess that I did not do much parleying with my sense of equation or justice. Although I knew these men to be in the main underpaid and overworked, and in so far as the corporation was concerned mere machines to be pushed to the limit of their capacity and discharged when no longer useful, still I stood beside them and ordered and commanded, urging first one and then the other with shouts and gruff words, until at last they were as wrought up and as harried by me as they had been by any one of whom I had previously complained. They were driven, harassed _by me_, until one, irritated by the anachronism of it all, no doubt, my previous enthusiasm for better conditions, turned on me with: “Yes--hurry! Hurry! You didn’t work so hard yourself, though!” I paused in my ordering and walked aside a little space to consider. How true was the thing he said! I had not worked so. It had been a constant complaint with me, in my own mind at least, that so much insistence and heartless driving had never been justified by the reward offered, that the men were entitled to more than they received for the grudging toil they gave. And here was I outdoing these drivers who to me had seemed most brutal!