"You don't see how it can happen," said Marsh, with one of those keen sudden looks that showed he was aware of my presence. "You admit this place is a watery hell, but you don't believe we can change it. You don't see how ignorant mobs of men can rise up and take the whole game in their hands. Do I get you right?" "You do," I said. "Look over there." I followed his glance to the doorway. It was filled with a group of big ragged men. Some of the faces were black with soot, some were smiling stolidly, some scowling in the effort to hear. All eyes were intent on the face of the man who had never been known to lose a strike. "That's the beginning," Marsh told me. "You keep your eyes on their faces--from now on right into the strike--and you may see something grow there that'll give you a new religion." As the day wore into evening the crowd from outside pressed into the room until they were packed all around us. "Let's get out of this," said Joe at last. We went to a neighboring lunchroom and ate a hasty supper. But as here, too, the crowd pressed in to get a look at Marsh, Joe asked us to come up to his room. "They _know_ your room," Marsh answered. His tone was grim, as though he had been accustomed for years to this ceaselessly curious pressing mass, pressing, pressing around him tight. "Suppose we go up to mine," he said. "I want you fellows to meet my wife. She has never met any writers before," he added to me, "and she's interested in that kind of thing. She was a music teacher once." I was about to decline and start for home, but suddenly I recalled Eleanore's saying that she would like to meet Mrs. Marsh. So I accepted his invitation. And what I saw a few minutes later brought me down abruptly from these world-wide schemes for labor. We entered a small, cheap hotel, climbed a flight of stairs and came into the narrow bedroom which was for the moment this notorious wanderer's home. A little girl about six years old lay asleep on a cot in one corner, and under the one electric light a woman sat reading a magazine. She had a strong rather clever face which would have been appealing if it were not for the bitter impatient glance she gave us as we entered. "Talk low, boys, our little girl's asleep," Marsh said. "Say, Sally," he continued, with his faint, derisive smile, "here's a writer come to see you." "Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," she said, then relapsed into a stiff silence. I tried to break through her awkwardness but entirely without avail. I grew more and more sure of my first impression, that this woman hated her husband's friends, his strikes, his "proletariate." She was smart, pushing, ambitious, I thought, just the kind that would have got on in any middle western town. Eleanore must meet her. Then presently I noticed that only Marsh was talking. I glanced at Joe and was startled by the intensity in his eyes.