CHAPTER XXVI Afterwards, when Mary looked back at the leading incidents of the big strike it wasn't the epic note which interested her the most, although the contest had for her its moments of exaltation. Nor did her thoughts revert the oftenest to those strange things which might have engrossed the chance observer--work and happiness walking hand in hand, for instance, to the accompaniment of Mrs. Kelly's drum--or woman showing that she can acquire the same dexterity on a drilling machine as on a sewing machine, the same skill at a tempering oven as at a cook stove, the same competence and neatness in a factory as in a house. Indeed, when all is said and done, the sound of the work which women were presently doing at New Bethel was only an echo of the tasks which women had done during four years of war, and being a repetition of history, it didn't surprise Mary when she stopped to think it over. But looking back at the whole experience later, these were the two reflections which interested her the most. "They have always called woman a riddle," she thought. "I wonder if that is because she could never be natural. If woman has been a riddle in the past, I wonder if this is the answer now...." That was her first reflection. Her second was this, and in it she unconsciously worded one of the great lessons of life. "The things I worried about seldom happened. It was something which nobody ever dreamed of--that nearly ended everything." And when she thought of that, her breath would come a little quicker and soon she would shake her head, and try to put her mind on something else; although if you had been there I think you would have seen a suspicious moisture in her eye, and if she were in her room at home, she would go to a photograph on the wall-the picture of a gravely smiling girl on a convent portico--signed "With all my love, Rosa." Still, as you can see, I am running ahead of my story, and so that you may better understand Mary's two reflections and the events which led to them, I will now return to the morning when she received Archey's message that every man in the factory had gone on strike as a protest against the employment of women. As soon as she reached the office she sent a facsimile letter to the skilled women workers who had applied from out of town. "If we only get a third of them," she thought, "we'll pull through somehow." But Mary was reckoning without her book. For one thing, she was unaware of the publicity which her experiment was receiving, and for another thing perhaps it didn't occur to her that the same yearnings, the same longings, the same stirrings which moved her own heart and mind so often--the same vague feeling of imprisonment, the same vague groping for a way out--might also be moving the hearts and minds of countless other women, and especially those who had for the first time in their lives achieved economic independence by means of their labour in the war.