She did not change in her attitude even when she found the prices of piece work went down lower and lower, so that at last she was obliged to work overtime late into the night in order to earn the small amount she had previously earned by day. She was seventy years old when the legality of the Illinois Ten Hour Law was contested, and her employer wanted her to testify in court that she was opposed to the law because she could not have supported her old mother all those years unless she had been allowed to work nights. She found herself at last dimly conscious of what it was that her long time enemies, the union girls, had been trying to do, and a subconscious loyalty to her own kind made it impossible for her to bear testimony against them. She did not analyze her motives but told me that, fearing she might yield to her employer’s request, in sheer panic she had abruptly left his factory and moved her helpless household to another part of the city on the very day she was expected to appear in court. In her haste she left four days unpaid wages behind her, and moving the family took all the money she had painstakingly saved for the coming winter’s coal. She had unknowingly moved into a neighborhood of cheap restaurants, and from that time on she worked in any of them which would employ her until now at last she was too feeble to be of much use to anybody. Although she had never joined the Union which finally became so flourishing in the box factory she had left, she was conscious that in a moment of great temptation she had refrained from seeking her own advantage at the expense of others. As she bunglingly tried to express her motives, she said: “The Irish--you know I was ten years old when we came over--often feel like that; it isn’t exactly that you are sorry after you have done a thing, nor so much that you don’t do it because you know you will be sorry afterwards, nor that anything in particular will happen to you if you do it, but that you haven’t the heart for it, that it goes against your nature.” When I expressed my admiration for her prompt action she replied: “I have never told this before except to one person, to a woman who was organizing for the garment workers and who came to my house one night about nine o’clock, just as I was having my supper. I had it late in those days because I used to scrub the restaurant floor after everybody left. My sister was asleep back of the stove, I looked sharp not to wake her up and I don’t believe the Union woman ever knew that she wasn’t just like other people. The organizer was looking for some of the women living in our block who had been taking work from the shops ever since the strike was on. She was clean tired out, and when I offered her a cup of tea she said as quick as a flash, ‘You are not a scab, are you?’ I just held up my poor old hands before her face, swollen red from scrubbing and full of chilblains, and I told her that I couldn’t sew a stitch if my life depended on it.