Sally hesitated before going into Marrin's that Monday morning. A blinding snow-storm was being released over the city, and the fierce gusts eddied about the corner of Fifth Avenue, blew into drifts, lodged on sill and cornice and lintel, and blotted out the sky and the world. Through the wild whiteness a few desolate people ploughed their way, buffeted, blown, hanging on to their hats, and quite unable to see ahead. Sally shoved her red little hands into her coat pockets, and stood, a careless soul, in the white welter. From her shoulder, some hundred feet to the south, ran the plate-glass of Marrin's, spotted and clotted and stringy with snow and ice, and right before her was the entrance for deliveries and employees. A last consideration held her back. She had been lying awake nights arguing with her conscience. Joe had told her not to do it--that it would only stir up trouble--but Joe was too kindly. In the battles of the working people a time must come for cruelty, blows, and swift victory. Marrin was an out-and-out enemy to be met and overthrown; he had made traitors of the men; he had annihilated Izon; she would fight him with the women. Nor was this the only reason. Sally felt that her supreme task was to organize the women in industry, to take this trampled class and make of it a powerful engine for self-betterment, and no women were more prepared, she felt, than the shirtwaist-makers. She knew that at Marrin's the conditions were fairly good, though, even there, women and young girls worked sometimes twelve hours and more a day, and earned, many of them, but four or five dollars a week. What tempted Sally, however, was the knowledge that a strike at Marrin's would be the spark to set off the city and bring out the women by the thousands. It would be the uprising of the women; the first upward step from sheer wage-slavery; the first advance toward the ideal of that coming woman, who should be a man in her freedom and her strength and her power, and yet woman of woman in her love and her motherhood and wife-hood. Industry, so Sally knew, was taking the young girls by the million, overworking them, sapping them of body and soul, and casting them out unfit to bear children, untrained to keep house, undisciplined to meet life and to be a comrade of a man. And Sally knew, moreover, what could be done. She knew what she had accomplished with the hat-trimmers. Nevertheless, she hesitated, not quite sure that the moment had come. Joe's words detained her in a way no man's words had ever done before. But she thought: "I do this for him. I sharpen the edge of his editorial and drive it home. Words could never hurt Marrin--but I can." She got under the shelter of the doorway and with numb hand pulled a copy of _The Nine-Tenths_ from her pocket, unfolded it, and reread the burning words of: "Forty-five Treacherous Men." They roused all her fighting blood; they angered her; they incited her.