Emily was in a fever as she cashed the order and went uptown to pack a small trunk and catch the six o’clock train. Going on an important mission thus early in her career as a working-woman would have been exciting enough, however quiet the occasion. But going among militia and rioters, going unchaperoned with two men, going the wildest part of the excursion with one man and he an artist of unsteady habits who would need watching—she could not grasp it. However, an hour after they were settled in the Pullman, she had forgotten everything except the work she was to do—or fail to do. Indeed, it had already begun. Marlowe brought with him a big bundle of newspapers, and a boy from the Democrat’s Philadelphia office came to the station there, and gave him another and bigger bundle.
“I’m reading up,” said Marlowe, “and it won’t do you any harm to do the same. Then, when we arrive, we’ll know all that’s been going on, and we’ll be able to step right into it without delay.”
The artist went to the smoking compartment. She and Marlowe attacked the papers. Both read until dinner, and again after dinner until the berths were made. When they talked it was of the strike. Marlowe neither by word nor by look indicated that he was conscious of any but a purely professional bond between them. And she soon felt as he acted—occasionally hoping that he did not altogether feel as he acted, but was restraining himself through fine instinct.
When they separated at Pittsburg, and she and the artist were on the way in the chill morning to the train for Furnaceville, she remembered that he had not shown the slightest anxiety about the peril into which she was going—and going by his arrangement. But she was soon deep in the Pittsburg morning papers, her mind absorbed in the battle between brain-workers and brawn-workers of which she was to be a witness. She was impatient to arrive, impatient to carry out the suggestions which her imagination had evolved from what she had been reading. To her the strike, with its anxieties and perils for thousands, meant only her own opportunity, as she noted with some self-reproach.
“I hope they’ll get licked,” said the artist.
“Who?” asked Emily, looking at him more carefully than she had thus far, and remembering that he had not been introduced to her and that she did not know his name.
“The workingmen, of course,” he replied. “I know them. My father was one of ’em. I came from this neighbourhood.”
“I should think your sympathies would be with them.” Emily was coldly polite. She did not like the young man’s look of coarse dissipation—dull eyes, clouded skin, and unhealthy lips and teeth.
“That shows you don’t know them. They are the most unreasonable lot, and if they had the chance they’d be brutal tyrants. They have no respect for brains.”
“But they might be right in this case. I don’t say that they are. It’s so difficult to judge what is right and what wrong.”