In the afternoon Yetta was loaded into "the wagon" with a lot of "drunks" and prostitutes and taken up to the Department dock to wait for the ferry across to the Island.
She had not realized how the month's strain had tired her until the excitement was over and she was on the tug in midstream. In sheer weariness, she turned round on her seat and, crossing her arms on its back, buried her face in them. Presently she felt a hand on her shoulder.
"Don't take it so hard, Little One," a not unkindly voice said. "It's fierce at first, but you get used to it." She looked up into a face of stained and faded gaudiness.
"Oh," the woman said, somewhat taken aback. "You're one of them strikers. Did they beat you up?"
"No," Yetta replied, "I got off easy."
The woman stood a moment first on one foot and then on the other—she could not think of anything more to say. She went across the boat and told one of her cronies what kind of a shame she thought it was "to run in a nice girl like that."
Yetta was in a strange state of detachment. It surprised her afterwards to remember how little the discomforts of the prison had troubled her. She was hardly conscious of the dirty, rough clothes they gave her. The bitter, hard, and useless work of scrubbing the stone flagging seemed to her unreal. She hardly noticed the food they set before her for supper. She was not hungry. And when they let her go to bed, she plunged so quickly and deeply into the oblivion of sleep that she did not feel the vermin nor hear the sinister whispers of her cell-mates. Her mind, utterly fagged out with all the new thoughts and experiences, was taking a vacation. Even the sense nerves were too tired to record with exactitude their impressions.
Before Yetta fell into this blissful, dreamless sleep her arrest had begun to stir up considerable excitement in New York. When Braun and Longman returned to the strike headquarters from the court-house, they found Mabel preparing to go uptown to the meeting of the Advisory Council. The imprisonment of Yetta seemed to her the crowning outrage of the long list of trivial arrests. She did not dream how nearly the charge came to being true. Dozens of other girls had been sent to the workhouse on perjured evidence. But this seemed different. Yetta was "hers." In the past weeks she had become "her" friend. So are we all constituted. We read in the morning paper that thousands of Chinese or Russians or Moors are dying of famine. Perhaps we mail a check to the Red Cross. But if we should be hungry or one of our dear friends should starve, it would seem extravagantly unjust.
In this ireful frame of mind, Mabel met the ladies of the Advisory Council. To them also Yetta was a much more real personality than the other girls who had been arrested. Their Yetta, their quiet-mannered, sad-eyed, gentle-voiced Yetta, arrested for assaulting a man? It was impossible! With the tears in her eyes, Mabel assured them that it was true.
"We can't permit this," Mrs. Van Cleave said, snapping her lorgnette ominously. "It is preposterous! The young lady has been a guest in my house. I have introduced her to my friends. It can't be permitted."