"How harsh you women are in your judgments of each other," laughed Dorn, busy at his desk.
"We are just," replied Selma. "We are not fooled by each other's pretenses."
Dorn apparently had not heard. Selma saw that to speak would be to interrupt. She sat at her own table and set to work on the editorial paragraphs. After perhaps an hour she happened to glance at Victor. He was leaning back in his chair, gazing past her out into the open; in his face was an expression she had never seen—a look in the eyes, a relaxing of the muscles round the mouth that made her think of him as a man instead of as a leader. She was saying to herself. "What a fascinating man he would have been, if he had not been an incarnate cause."
She felt that he was not thinking of his work. She longed to talk to him, but she did not venture to interrupt. Never in all the years she had known him had he spoken to her—or to any one—a severe or even an impatient word. His tolerance, his good humor were infinite. Yet—she, and all who came into contact with him, were afraid of him. There could come, and on occasion there did come—into those extraordinary blue eyes an expression beside which the fiercest flash of wrath would be easy to face.
When she glanced at him again, his normal expression had returned—the face of the leader who aroused in those he converted into fellow-workers a fanatical devotion that was the more formidable because it was not infatuated. He caught her eye and said:
"Things are in such good shape for us that it frightens me. I spend most of my time in studying the horizon in the hope that I can foresee which way the storm's coming from and what it will be."
"What a pessimist you are!" laughed Selma.
"That's why the Workingmen's League has a thick-and-thin membership of thirteen hundred and fifty," replied Victor. "That's why the New Day has twenty-two hundred paying subscribers. That's why we grow faster than the employers can weed our men out and replace them with immigrants and force them to go to other towns for work."
"Well, anyhow," said the girl, "no matter what happens we can't be weeded out."
Victor shook his head. "Our danger period has just begun," he replied. "The bosses realize our power. In the past we've been annoyed a little from time to time. But they thought us hardly worth bothering with. In the future we will have to fight."