But during these days of the strike she was a quite free woman, snatching her sleep and her food carelessly, and putting in her time in spending heart and soul on the problem in hand. She dressed simply, in shirtwaist and skirt, and she moved among the people as if she were one of them, and with no sense of contrast. In fact, Myra was changing, changing rapidly. Her work called for a new set of powers, and without hesitation these new powers rose within her, emerged and became a part of her character. She became executive, quick, stepped into any situation that confronted her, knew when to be mild, when to be sharp, sensed where sympathy was needed, and also where sympathy merely softened and ruined. Her face, too, followed this inner change. Soft lines merged into something more vivid. She was usually pale, and her sweet, small mouth had a weary droop, but her eyes were keen and living, and lit with vital force. She began to see that a life of ease and a life of extreme toil were both equally bad--that each choked off possibilities. She knew then that women of her type walked about with hidden powers unused, their lives narrowed and blighted, negative people who only needed some great test, some supreme task, to bring out those hidden forces, which, gushing through the soul, overflowing, would make of them characters of abounding vitality. She felt the glory of men and women who go about the world bubbling over with freshness and zest and life, warming the lives they move among, spreading by quick contagion their faith and virility. She longed to be such a person--to train herself in that greatest of all the arts--the touching of other lives, drawing a music from long-disused heart-strings, rekindling, reanimating, the torpid spirit. It was her search for more _life_--richer, thicker, happier, more intense. Her model was Joe's mother. It seemed to her that Joe's mother had met life and conquered it, and so would never grow old. She never found the older woman soured or bitter or enfeebled. Even about death there was no flinching. "Don't you think I know," said Joe's mother, "that there is something precious in me that isn't going to go with the body? Just look at this body! That's just what's happening already! I'm too young to die. And besides I know one or two people whom I lost years ago--too precious to be lost--I've faith in them." This, then, is the greatest victory of life: to treat death as a mere incident in the adventure; an emigration to a new country; a brief and tragic "auf wiedersehen." It has its pang of parting, and its pain of new birth--all birth is a struggle full of pain--but it is the only door to the future. Well for Joe's mother that her hand was ready to grasp the dark knob and turn it when the time came. Once as she and Joe's mother were snatching a lunch together in the kitchen, the elder woman spoke softly: