On a Saturday night Ashbel came home with the news that his wages had been cut to seven dollars. And the restaurant had been paying steadily less as the hard times grew harder and the cost of unadulterated and wholesome food mounted higher and higher. As the family sat silent and stupefied, old Tom looked up from his paper, fixed his keen, mocking eyes on Susan. "I see, here," said he, "that _we_ are so rich that they want to raise the President's salary so as he can entertain _decently_--and to build palaces at foreign courts so as our representatives'll live worthy of _us_!" CHAPTER XX ON Monday at the lunch hour--or, rather, half-hour--Susan ventured in to see the boss. Matson had too recently sprung from the working class and was too ignorant of everything outside his business to have made radical changes in his habits. He smoked five-cent cigars instead of "twofurs"; he ate larger quantities of food, did not stint himself in beer or in treating his friends in the evenings down at Wielert's beer garden. Also he wore a somewhat better quality of clothing; but he looked precisely what he was. Like all the working class above the pauper line, he made a Sunday toilet, the chief features of which were the weekly bath and the weekly clean white shirt. Thus, it being only Monday morning, he was looking notably clean when Susan entered--and was morally wound up to a higher key than he would be as the week wore on. At sight of her his feet on the leaf of the desk wavered, then became inert; it would not do to put on manners with any of the "hands." Thanks to the bath, he was not exuding his usual odor that comes from bolting much strong, cheap food. "Well, Lorny--what's the kick?" inquired he with his amiable grin. His rise in the world never for an instant ceased to be a source of delight to him; it--and a perfect digestion--kept him in a good humor all the time. "I want to know," stammered Susan, "if you can't give me a little more money." He laughed, eyeing her approvingly. Her clothing was that of the working girl; but in her face was the look never found in those born to the modern form of slavery-wage servitude. If he had been "cultured" he might have compared her to an enslaved princess, though in fact that expression of her courageous violet-gray eyes and sensitive mouth could never have been in the face of princess bred to the enslaving routine of the most conventional of conventional lives; it could come only from sheer erectness of spirit, the exclusive birthright of the sons and daughters of democracy. "More money!" he chuckled. "You _have_ got a nerve!--when factories are shutting down everywhere and working people are tramping the streets in droves." "I do about one-fourth more than the best hands you've got," replied Susan, made audacious by necessity. "And I'll agree to throw in my lunch time." "Let me see, how much do you get?" "Three dollars."