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Several of us asked the sisters to luncheon, to dinner and to bridge parties. In return, the sisters entertained the club at tea, a function whereat Katy covered herself with glory, and Nellie graciously consented to pass plates and listen and break two heavy Colonial goblets–Nellie was slim and light on her feet, but she surely had a heavy hand.

Katy came over to borrow our monkey wrench the next morning because Nellie and the friend whom she had recommended to assist in waiting, had contrived to loosen a water faucet. She was brimming with criticisms of this last helper, as well as of Nellie.

“Did she stay to help wash dishes?” Thus she let her suppressed disgust explode. “Well, I should say ! And got extry pay for staying, too, and had her young man in for supper afterward; and the things she gave him to carry away, the fancy candies with bow-knots on them, and the cakes with roses, and the marionglasyes ! And when I spoke up to her she claimed Miss Mercy told her to–and there’s no saying, maybe she did! Her young man’s on strike; he’s at the locomotive works; she claims he gits four-fifty a day and he’s striking for more, I expect; he’s been on strike six weeks now, and he comes here to meals four times a week and eats–well, Miss Mercy said, ‘Make him welcome,’ so I do; but I own to you, Miss Patsy, something I feel real bad about. That young Mr. Gordon, it’s his pa is president of the works; he’s a real nice young man jest out of Harvard College, and he met Miss Mercy in Chicago and went ’round a lot with her, and I made up my mind and Nellie made up hers–and she ain’t a fool, Nellie, for all she’s so flighty–that they were going to make a match of it; but Nellie got Miss Mercy to promise she’d go speak to old Mr. Gordon about the strike; Miss Mercy’s got a awful lot of stock herself, in the works; and I dunno the rights of it, but I’m sure those young things had words ! It’s a bitter black shame, too, it is, dragging that poor child in! Doctor don’t like it any more than I do. And poor little Miss Mercy, she’s scared to death; but that won’t stop her; the more it hurts, the more she is sure she had ought to do it.”

I didn’t think little Miss Van Arden could move old Mr. Gordon’s convictions; but it was true that she was the largest individual stockholder in the works, and hence she might make trouble with the wavering minds, certainly trouble enough to irritate the president, who was a sterling, but not always a patient man.

“They want to run the works as a closed shop, don’t they?” I asked.

“Jest that. Miss Mercy, if she is a reforming lady, she ain’t arrergant like most sich; and she asked me what I thought about the strike. She got my opinion of it cold. ‘There’s strikes and strikes,’ says I. ‘Strikes for higher wages may be right or wrong, as depends, but a strike for the right to keep every other man but your gang out of a job is bound to be wrong. I ain’t no sympathy with any kind of closed shops, whether the bosses close ’em to union men, or the union men close ’em to everybody ‘cept themselves.'”

The next day I saw the little Socialist’s white, miserable face go by my window with Katy’s solid cheer at her elbow. She had agreed to see Mr. Gordon first before she appeared at the board meetting, and (as Katy put it) “poured coal oil on the fire to put it out.” Of course, there was a useless journey. Mr. Gordon felt moved to utter certain pet opinions of his own regarding the ease of making mischief when ignorant people interfered in business. If it was any comfort to her to know that she was giving him an infernal lot of trouble she could take it all right; but he had to do right according to his own conscience, and not hers, and he wished her good-morning. Very limp and dejected she departed.