Her hot blue gaze plumbed the dark depths of his. “I do, Luke! You know I trust you! But why can’t I go to Nancy Carey, and make her come down here and see conditions and contrast them with other mills, and realize-- She’s a soft little thing, but she’s gentle and kind, and----” He cut her short. “Yes--gentle and kind like old Carey’s gentle and kind--when it won’t interfere with their own comforts or profits. Carey’s good-natured; he wouldn’t kick a dog or curse a nigger, but he’ll grind every ounce of work out of his hands and house ’em like swine, and never figure he’s being hard. No, Glen--you wait!” She was mutinous. “Wait, wait, wait! I’m sick of it, Luke? What am I waiting _for_?” He considered in silence for a long moment. “Wait till I’m so necessary to him that he’ll have to listen to me.” “But, Luke, he listens to you now! It’s wonderful the way he talks to you and takes your advice about things! Why, he’d listen to you this minute!” She came close to him, eager, ardent. “Yes--and laugh at me, and tell me to mind my own business! And my business is to try to get the mill out of the red ink just now. No, Glen,” he said again, gravely, regretfully, “you wait.” So the doctor’s daughter waited, perforce, and found a fresh outlet for her emotion. There had been a surprising influx of foreigners to the Altonia in recent years, dark-eyed, dark-skinned South Europeans whom Ben Birdsall disliked and distrusted. “Good Americans is good enough for me,” the superintendent liked to say virtuously. “Bunch o’ soreheads, always kickin’ about something. If it don’t suit ’em here, let ’em go back where they come from! Wish t’ th’ Lawd I dast clean ’em out, but we need ’em!” Glen found them odd and interesting. There were graybeards among them with simmering passion in their eyes who exhorted fellow workers at stealthy evening meetings, swarthy youths who flared into open resentment at a word, richly colored, full-breasted girls who moved among the mill workers like sly flames, and one outstanding figure, by reason of fervor and superior intelligence, a man called Black Orlo, who edited a tiny paper named _The Torch_. It came out weekly or monthly, as the editor was able to manage, and was printed in secret on a crude hand press, and while Mr. Carey had ordered its suppression, the sparks still flew, and some of them ignited the red-haired girl. “Glen,” Luke warned her, “I wouldn’t read that rag! I wouldn’t be caught with it!” But she continued to read it, for Black Orlo said in vigorous print the things she swallowed back every day of her life, and she found it a safety valve. The man himself, dark, saturnine, unshaven, unsavory, was repulsive to her, but she found his utterances stimulating.