As if she were conscious that I was recalling her past with which I had been so familiar, she began to speak again. “You know that I have both of my children with me now; the girl graduates from the Normal School in June and hopes to put herself through the University after she has taught for a few years. She reminds me of her father in her anxiety to know people of education, to get on in the world, and I am sure she will succeed. The boy has caught the other motive of pulling up with his own trade and of standing by the organized Labor Movement. Of course, sewing was too dull for him, and besides he grew ambitious to be a machinist when he was in the Industrial School where I put him with such a breaking of the heart when he was only ten years old. He has to admit, however, that even his own Machinists’ Union, with its traditional trade agreements and joint boards, is far behind our experiment. He went with me to the banquet on May Day. We had marched through the Loop in celebration of our new agreement and had stirring speeches at the Auditorium in the afternoon, but it was in the evening that we really felt at home with each other. When he saw the tremendous enthusiasm for our beloved leader--my boy, I am sorry to say, is a little inclined to despise foreigners and also tailors because they aren’t as big and brawny as the members of his dear Machinists’ Union--and really caught some notion of the statesmanlike ability required for the successful management of such a complicated and difficult industrial experiment, and when he realized that the ten per cent increase provided for in the new agreement was to go in greater proportion to those at the lower end of the scale, he suddenly forgot his prejudices and I saw him applauding with his hands and feet as if he had really let loose at last. “Of course, it hasn’t been easy for me even during these later years to keep Helen in school and to support my aunt who is now too old and broken even to keep house for us. But we have got on, and quite aside from everything else I am thankful to have had a small share in this forward step in American democracy--at least, that’s what they called it at the banquet,” she ended shyly. The experience of my friend bore testimony that in spite of all their difficulties and handicaps, something of social value is forced out of the very situation itself among that vast multitude of women whose oppression through the centuries has typified a sense of helpless and intolerable wrongs. Many of them, even the older ones, are being made slowly conscious of the subtle and impalpable filaments that secretly bind their experiences and moods into larger relations, and they are filled with a new happiness analogous to that of little children when they are first taught to join hands in ordered play.