Roger gave her fingers a quick grip, and they stepped from the protection of the buildings into a side crossing. The wind tore at them. Bent against it, they reached the opposite curb. In that interval Anne felt the matter had been settled beyond change.
"I think I'll take the car here. It's useless trying to walk in this wind."
Just then Anne's car came into sight. They hurried out into the street and Roger helped her through the crush about the steps. It was nice to have Roger making a way for her, to feel the strong, sure lift of his hand under her arm, to feel herself swung up by such a small expenditure of his strength. Now that the decision was made, Anne was glad. After all, no matter what the conditions, her people would have found some objection. Clinging to the hand-strap almost beyond her reach, Anne went over the best ways of opening the subject to them.
But in the end Anne did not open it. She was catapulted from an unusually pleasant meal, straight into it, by a chance remark of her father's.
"I see there's likely to be another street railway strike," he remarked. "They were running provisions into the carbarn as I passed."
"Well, now, that will be a nuisance." Hilda beamed round the table. Any general conversations at dinner always made her feel that they were, after all, a closely knit family. "Thank goodness, I don't have to go on a car to do any shopping, although those Saturday sales at the Sunset Market are quite a save."
"Didn't the company promise the men not to push that matter of open shop until the year was up?" Anne, like her mother, was glad of any general conversation, and had no intention of bringing down the wrath of her father. But he peered at her suddenly over the top of his steel-rimmed glasses.
"What if they did? How long do you think the men would have kept their agreement not to agitate a strike if they had been in a position to call one?"
Anne felt herself chill; a thin surface of frost seemed to cover her as it always did when her father talked like this. But she did not want to anger him and so she said quietly:
"I don't know. But I would like to think that there was a little decency and honesty in the world. There must be."