"Nothing unusual—in my family—Miss Frazer. I've just been cut to the Bonbright Foote pattern. I didn't fit my groove exactly—so I was trimmed until I slipped into it. I'm in now."
A sudden tumult of shouts and cheers arose in the street under his window; not the sound of a score of voices nor of a hundred, but a sound of great volume. Ruth looked up, startled, frightened. Bonbright stepped to the window. "It's only eleven o'clock," he said, "but the men are all coming out…. The whistle didn't blow. They're cheering and capering and shaking hands with one another. What does that mean, do you suppose?"
"I'm afraid," said Miss Frazer, "it's your placard."
"My placard?"
"The men had their choice between their unions and their jobs—and they've stood by their unions."
"You mean—?"
"They've struck," said Ruth.
CHAPTER V
There are family traditions among the poor just as there are among the rich. The families of working-men may cling as tenaciously to their traditions as the descendants of an earl. In certain families the sons are compelled by tradition to become bakers, in others machinists; still other lowly family histories urge their members to conduct of one sort or another. It is inherent in them to hold certain beliefs regarding themselves. Here is a family whose tradition is loyalty to another family which has employed the father, son, grandfather; across the street may live a group whose peculiar religion is to oppose all constituted authority and to uphold anarchism. Theories and beliefs are handed down from generation to generation until they assume the dignity of blood laws.
Bonbright was being wrenched to fit into the Foote tradition. Ruth Frazer, his secretary, needed no alterations to conform to the tradition of HER family. This was the leveling tradition; the elevating of labor and the pulling down of capital until there was a dead level of equality—or, perhaps, with labor a bit in the saddle. Probably a remote ancestor of hers had been a member of an ancient guild; perhaps one had risen with Wat Tyler. Not a man of the family, for time beyond which the memory of man runneth not, but had been a whole-souled, single-purposed labor man—trade-union man—extremist—revolutionist. Her father had been killed in a labor riot—and beatified by her. As the men of her family had been, so were the women—so was she.