"I've got to go to a league meeting," she excused herself. When she had gone and he was standing with his back to the fire, sipping his tea and talking pleasantly of the weather, or the barber's children, or poor Flora's tendency to put too much starch in the table linen (raising his voice, in a matter-of-fact way, when there was a noise behind the door of the other room), he agreed warmly with Mrs. Payton's tribute to her daughter: "Freddy is getting companionable." "Indeed she is!" he said, and added that she was remarkably clever about puzzles--which pleased Mrs. Payton very much. This new sense of sympathy which held Fred down to picture puzzles, made her try to avoid topics on which she knew she and her mother could not agree. As the winter went on, the especial topic to be avoided was a strike among the rubber workers. Fred was passionately for the strikers, who were all girls. She went constantly to Hazelton, where the factory was, to give what help she could to the union women, and to admonish them that the way to cure industrial conditions, which all fair-minded people admitted were frightful, was by the ballot. "Get the man's ballot, and you'll get the man's wages!" was her slogan--and she was quite fierce with her man of business when he pointed out the economic fallacy of her words. "The kingdom of God cometh not by the ballot," he admonished her. "I feel as if I were going to Sunday-school!" "A little Sunday-school wouldn't hurt you. It never seems to strike you," he ruminated, "that if 'laws,' which you are so anxious to have a hand in making, could settle supply and demand, the men, poor creatures, would have feathered their own nests a little better." To which Miss Payton replied, concisely, "Rot!"--and continued to tell the strikers that suffrage was a cure-all. It was in March that one of the morning papers announced, with snobbish detail, that Miss Freddy Payton, a "young society girl," had "patrolled" to keep off scabs. That evening, at dinner, Mrs. Payton, mortified to death at the notoriety, and encouraged by Arthur Weston's presence at the table, ventured into controversy: "When I was a young lady--" she began, and instantly Frederica's lance was in rest! She did not mean to be cruel--but she couldn't help being smart. Her mother's injured sense of propriety was batted back to her across the dinner-table, like a shuttlecock from a resounding battledore. "You may say what you like," Mrs. Payton said, obstinately, "but I don't believe it would make a bit of difference to give those perfectly uneducated Italian girls a vote. It hasn't," she ended, with one of those flashes of shrewdness so characteristic of dull women, "made any difference in the men's wages. And, anyhow, I don't understand why you like to mix yourself up with all sorts of persons." "The Founder of your religion mixed Himself with all sorts of persons," Frederica said, wickedly; "but, of course, He would not be in society to-day."