The man who took me to see her made an unfortunate remark. He told her that I wanted to write an article about her, and asked if she wouldn’t tell me how she got started in her work. (I tried to stop him in time, but it was no use.) She gave me one scornful look and then flashed at him: “That’s a woman’s question. No man ever asks me such a fool thing, but women always do. How do I know how I got started? I was always a worker—that’s all.” Another of her simplifications is that there are two kinds of people—those who work and those who don’t. She seemed to put me with the latter, and it was my instinct from the first that she didn’t approve of me. She just treated me politely, and it was rather awful. She kept insisting that women know nothing about Labor—which is _almost_ quite true—and of course she didn’t neglect to mention her aversion for the suffragists. But most of the time she told us stories, chuckling heartily whenever she could say anything particularly explosive. She described her recent trip to New York, and I remember her vivid account of a visit she made the Colony Club. She said all the women came tripping in on high heels, bent forward at an ominous angle that made her think of cats ready to spring on a mouse. “I’ve got no time for such idiots,” she finished. “And look at the crazy ones in this town, walking in a mayor’s parade and yelling like wildcats instead of staying at home where they might be reading and learning to educate their children.” That night we went to hear her talk to an organization of painters and found her irresistible. But she did little except entertain them—particularly with stories in which she herself figured as the white-haired heroine, wading across streams in water up to her waist to outwit the police, or forcibly throwing a Burns detective out of her audience. The painters shrieked with joy at that, and it really was good to hear. She had suspected a certain man who had been going to her meetings, so one night she asked him to leave. He refused, but she insisted. He said, “I won’t go and I’d like to see anybody who can make me.” “Well,” she answered, “we’ll see about that”; and she stepped down from the platform, took him by the throat, held him so tightly “that his tongue stuck out,” and marched him out of the hall. He didn’t bother her any more. These things, told in her blunt, snappy way, are overwhelmingly funny—and stirring too. But what you like most about her is her sudden falling into seriousness, and the way she says, “Now, my boys, _stick together_. Solidarity is the only method by which we can beat the system.”