"You've been at it again with Pedloe!"
"I certainly have. He's having a fit because I'm on the committee for arranging strike relief. Of course, personally, Mrs. Herrick, my sympathies are all for the strikers, but you understand that officially——' Round and round he goes like a frightened squirrel. Honestly, it's pitiful. He can't come out openly on either side. He's just as shackled by that $6000 a year salary as a convict with a ball and chain. What do you think he told me?"
Jean forced aside the figure of Gregory and put Dr. Pedloe in his place. Holding the head of the Charity Organization firmly before her eyes, she began walking up and down.
"Almost anything, from the way you look."
"He said that this strike, it's got fifty thousand women now and it may become sympathetic before it's over and take in hundreds, was essentially a struggle of Jewish workers. That the Hebrew Relief should supplement strike benefits. And that in the cases of others, Christians, well, he did not know just what they could do, but he was very sure that the Organization could do nothing. Why? Because the roots of the thing ramify so that some of our very heaviest subscribers are in the tangle, and he doesn't dare go against them."
"What's he want you to do? Resign from the committee?"
"Yes. He hinted around for an hour, hoping I'd help him out, I suppose, but I just sat and let him fidget. So in the end he came out flat and told me he could not stand for having me officially mixed up in it and I told him that I was not officially mixed up, that it was purely a question of personal belief,—you ought to have seen him at that,—and friendship for Rachael Cohen. He got off the strike then, quick, and began to hint that in other ways I did not measure up to Organized ethics. I always knew he was furious at those talks I gave last winter, but he never said anything before. He was quite worked up to-day, however, and finally put it just about as plainly as Tom did to Rachael. You know he gave her the choice between him, a decent home in the Bronx—and her people."
"Do I understand that Dr. Pedloe——"
"Scarcely. But he did intimate that in future he would be grateful if I would attend to my duties as per Organization and nothing else. I told him I would think it over and he almost fell out of his chair. He simply can't conceive of any one throwing up a perfectly good job 'with a certain position in this community, Mrs. Herrick.'"
"Are you going to?"