"Did you think all that talk was aimed at you?" my pitiless spouse continued. "Did you think all that change in Joe's point of view was on your account?" I watched her vigilantly for a while. "If there's anything in what you say," I remarked carefully at last, "I'll bet at least that Joe doesn't know it. He doesn't even suspect it." "There are so many things," said Eleanore, "that men don't even suspect in themselves. I'm sorry," she added regretfully. "But that summer vacation we'd planned is off." "What?" "Oh, yes, we'll stay right here in town. I see anything but a pleasant summer." "Suppose," I said excitedly, "you tell me exactly what you _do_ see!" "I see something," Eleanore answered, "which unless we can stop it may be a very tragic affair. Tragic for Sue because I feel sure that she'd never stand Joe's impossible life. And even worse for your father. He's not only old and excitable, and very weak and feeble, too, but he's so conservative besides that if Sue married Joe Kramer he'd consider her utterly damned." "But I tell you you're wrong, all wrong!" I broke in. "Joe isn't that kind of an idiot!" "Joe," said my wife decidedly, "is like every man I've ever met. I found that out when he was sick. He has the old natural longing for a wife and a home of his own. His glimpse of it here may have started it rising. I'm no more sure than you are that he admits it to himself. But it's there all the same in the back of his mind, and in that same mysterious region he's trying to reconcile marrying Sue to the work which he believes in--even with this strike coming on. It's perfectly pathetic. "Isn't it funny," she added, "how sometimes everything comes all at once? Do you know what this may mean to us? I don't, I haven't the least idea. I only know that you yourself are horribly unsettled--and that now through this affair of Sue's we'll have to see a good deal of Joe--and not only Joe but his friends on the docks--and not even the quiet ones. No, we're to see all the wild ones. We're to be drawn right into this strike--into what Joe calls revolution." "You may be right," I said doggedly. "But I don't believe it." CHAPTER VIII A few days later Joe called me up and asked me to come down to his office. His reason for wanting to see me, he said, he'd rather not give me over the 'phone. "You're right," I told Eleanore dismally. "He's going to talk to me about Sue." I dreaded this talk, and I went to see Joe in no easy frame of mind. But it was not about Sue. I saw that in my first glimpse of his face. He sat half around in his office chair listening intensely to a man by his side. "I want you to meet Jim Marsh," he said.