No one sought the nomination, for it was a hard and thankless job, so Yetta was elected by acclamation.
"Ve vill nearly kill her mit vork. Yes?" Stringer said to Isadore as the meeting broke up.
"Do you think she'll accept?" Isadore asked dubiously.
"Sure, she vill. It is a gut girl. I haf not as yet asked her, but now I vill write a letter und tell her."
He gave the note to Isadore to deliver.
Yetta finished her copy about midnight, but finding much detail still needing attention at the strike headquarters, she decided to make a night of it and sleep in Brooklyn with a family of strikers. It was three in the morning before she turned in—too tired to remember with any clearness that her butterfly wings had been broken. More than once during the day she had had to fight against her tears—to struggle against the desire to drop all this work and rush back to Manhattan and Walter. But always at the weak moment some one who was weaker had asked her help.
It all had to be fought out again when she woke. She might not have won, if the conviction had not come to her during her sleep that somehow it must all turn out right in the end. When she reached "headquarters" she found so much to do that she had no time to mourn. The first mail brought in more than fifty dollars—the result of her yesterday's story. But better still was the fact that The Clarion's glaring headlines had forced the attention of the regular papers. The strike was receiving wide publicity. There is no other class of evil-doers who so ardently love darkness in their business as "unfair" employers. The bosses had not been much worried by the revolt of their workers, but they did not like to read about it—to have their acquaintances read about it—in their morning papers.
It was ten o'clock before Yetta could get away. Coming across on the elevated, she had her first chance to look at the yesterday's issue of The Clarion. It caused a revulsion from her feeling of enthusiasm over a working-man's paper. What a pitiful sheet it was! How different in tone and quality from the one Walter had talked of so glowingly! It was not only unattractive in appearance. There was not a detail which, to Yetta's trained eye, seemed well done. The headlines of her own story, which spread across the top of the front page, were crude. A dozen better ones suggested themselves to her. The mistakes they had made in expanding her telephone message to two columns were ludicrous and vexatious. What else was there in the paper? The rest of the front page was filled with telegrams which had been news several hours before it had gone to press! The second page—it was headed "Labor News"—offended Yetta especially. It was mostly "exchange paragraphs" clipped from trade journals. The original matter was written by some one who did not understand nor sympathize with the Trade-Union Movement, who evidently thought that every worker who was not a party member was mentally defective. The only spark of personality on the last page was Isadore's editorial. It was a bit ponderous and long-drawn-out, but at least it was intense and thoughtful. The cartoon was poorly drawn and required an analytic mind to discover the point. Yetta found it hard to believe that twelve thousand people had been willing to buy so uninteresting a paper when they could get the bright, snappy, sixteen-page Star for the same money.
She was tired and discouraged when she reached the office.
"I'm not a headline writer," she said as she tossed her copy on Levine's table, "but I've ground out some that aren't quite so stupid as those you ran yesterday."