“I!” he cried in amazement.
“Yes,” she said, and then suddenly smiled at his expression.
“Well,” he remarked helplessly, “if prying into your thoughts can be called kindness . . .” and paused.
“The kindness is in what you do it for,” she said quietly, and they came up with the boys.
It was far closer than he had ever approached her before.
Stacey’s intimacy with his father, too, was closer since the tragedy. Mr. Carroll could hardly be expected to understand the strange relationship that had held Marian and Stacey together and apart; he did not even have the necessary facts to go on. But he saw with all his direct clearness the effect of Marian’s sudden death on his son, and was very kind, and tactful as well. He even took obvious pains to avoid discussion of subjects—such as Bolshevism, labor and the Republican Party—on which he perhaps fancied his son did not at heart agree with him. This touched Stacey, but was quite unnecessary. Stacey had no more interest in Bolshevism or the other things than in the Mabinogion.
CHAPTER XXIV
In November a strike of the street-railway employees broke out. The company, which had applied for and obtained a seven-cent fare six months earlier, had now asked for the right to raise it to ten cents. The city council refused; whereupon the company, alleging its inability to carry on at even a modest profit under the existing costs, declared a twenty per cent. cut in wages, and the employees struck. The clash was fierce and there was much violence. The company imported strike-breakers from Chicago, they were mobbed, there were deaths, the militia was called out, and a few empty cars with shattered windows ran occasionally up and down the city streets.
Stacey was not particularly interested, having other things to think about. He barely glanced at the news headlines and smiled ironically as he did so, knowing that Colin Jeffries, who had a controlling interest in the stock of the street-railway company, also virtually owned the evening (Republican) paper and was engaged in many business enterprises with the owner of the morning (Democratic) paper. As for the editorials, he would no more have read them than he would have read the latest novel by Harold Bell Wright. But sometimes his father read them aloud at table in a tone of fierce assent, and thus Stacey learned that they were all about “one hundred per cent. Americanism” and the duty of labor to yield something, just as capital was yielding something.
However, one afternoon Edwards, whom Stacey had not seen for a week, suddenly entered the office.