“You see,” he repeated. “If it was June instead of November! But then it isn’t June. Wages are settled every year in November. So if there is to be a strike it can only begin in November.”
“But didn’t the men ask for the time of year to be changed?”
“Yes,” he said. “But you don’t suppose the masters were going to agree to that, do you?” He sneered masculinely.
“Why not?”
“Because it gives them such a pull.”
“What a shame!” Hilda exclaimed passionately. “And what a shame it is that the masters want to make the wages depend on selling prices! Can’t they see that selling prices ought to depend on wages?”
Edwin said nothing. She had knocked suddenly out of his head all ideas of flirting, and he was trying to reassemble them.
“I suppose you’re like all the rest?” she questioned gloomily.
“How like all the rest?”
“Against the men. Mr Orgreave is, and he says your father is very strongly against them.”