"No! no!" he said. "Everything helps--we must try every way--I may not be fit for any other way than this. But I'm beginning to think it isn't of the best sort. Maybe it's the only thing to do to-day, however." She began to throb with a great hope. "Don't you think," she cried, "you ought to go off and take a rest and think it over? You know you might go into politics, to Congress, or something--then you could really do something." He looked at her with surprise. "How you're thinking these days!" he mused. But then he went on very wearily. "Rest? Myra," his voice sank, "if I ever come out of this alive, I'll rest--rest deep, rest deep. But there's no end--no end to it...." He reverted to the problem of the strike. "Don't you think there's right on the other side, too? Don't you think many of the employers are doing all they can under present conditions? We're asking too much. We want men to change their methods before we change conditions. Who can do it? I tell you, I may be wronging as fine a lot of men as there are." "Then why did you go into it?" she asked, quickly. "I didn't. It came to me. It bore me under. But I haven't made a mistake this time. By chance I'm on the _righter_ side, the better side. When it comes to the women in industry, there's no question. It is killing the future to work them this way--it is intolerable, inhuman, insane. We must stop it--and as we _don't_ vote right, we _must_ strike. A strike is justified these days--will be, until there's some other way of getting justice. Anyway, this time," he said, fiercely, "I'm right. But I'm wondering about the future. I'm wondering...." He said nothing further, digging again at his notes. But Myra now nourished a hope, a secret throbbing hope ... the first ray of a new and more confident morning. XII CONFIDENT MORNING Myra moved down to West Tenth Street. She found a neat, little hall bedroom in one of the three-story brick houses--a little white room, white-curtained, white-walled, with white counterpane on the iron bed. She was well content with these narrow quarters, content because it was near Joe, content because it saved money (her savings were dwindling rapidly these days), and finally content because she had shifted the center of her interests to a different set of facts. She was both too busy and too aroused to be sensitive about running water and the minor comforts. Her whole being was engrossed in large activities, and she found with astonishment how many things she could do without. What previously had seemed so important, poetry, music, dress, quiet, ease, now became little things lost in a host of new big events. And, curiously enough, she found a new happiness in this freedom from superfluities--a sense of range and independence new to her. For at this time such things actually were superfluous, though the time was to come again when music and poetry had a new and heightened meaning.