The strike dragged along its wearied length. Popular sympathy, which had aided the shirtwaist-makers in their former rebellion, had lost its interest in the cause, and, as the newspapers said less, the employers became more demonstrative. Hired thugs guarded the factories and beat whatever young women dared, by the simplest words, to plead, in public, with the scab laborers. When these battles occurred the police, knowing well the interests of their masters, arrested the mere girls for assault and battery upon the thugs, forcing them to remain, if detained, on benches with women old in immorality and crime; and the magistrates before whom these dangerous female criminals were hailed, not forgetting which party to the suit could vote at the coming election, would often send the offenders to the Reformatory or the Island, where they could no longer interfere, or would impose fines calculated still more to deplete a strike-fund already pitiably shrunken. Some of the unionists had already laid down their arms and returned to the factories; more had gone over to another enemy and disappeared beneath the dark current of the underworld. The rest--and Carrie was among the number--must soon come face to face with starvation. Katie's difficulties, though as yet less physical, were scarcely less poignant. She found that she was rarely left long in one portion of the Lennox shop. From the chief woman's-hosiery department, she was shifted, without warning, to the handkerchief counter, and thence, again with no explanation, she was sent to help in the main aisle at a table where there was a special sale of stockings at reduced prices. At first these frequent shiftings appeared to result from no apparent cause. She was fined as much as the other clerks, but no more than they, and she could in no wise account for the changes. But at last she noticed that after a shift for the worse the sacrosanct Mr. Porter would usually happen by and open a conversation, and then she remembered that, before such a shift, this same side-whiskered gentleman had generally made overtures, and that those overtures had not been well received. The theory arising from these observations she resolved to confirm. After the next move she made deliberate eyes at the man she detested, and she was next day promoted, with a twenty-five cent increase of pay per week, to the silk-stocking counter. From that day she saw her warfare developing into a dangerous game of hide-and-seek in which Mr. Porter was "It," and from that day dated her increasing tendency to reconsider the determination not to marry Hermann Hoffmann.