"Don't you ever want to settle down?" she asked when there had come a pause. Marsh turned abruptly to Eleanore.
"Of course she does," he answered. "Did you ever know a woman who didn't, the minute that she got a kid? But my wife can't, if she sticks to me. She has had to make up her mind to live in any old place that comes along, from a dollar room in a cheap hotel to a shanty in a mining camp." And his look at Eleanore seemed to add, "That's the kind she is, you little doll."
Eleanore quickly made herself look as much like a doll as possible. She placidly folded her dainty gloved hands.
"I should think," she murmured in ladylike tones, "Mrs. Marsh would find that rather difficult."
"She does," said Marsh aggressively. "But my wife has nerve enough to stand up to the rough side of life—as the wives of most workingmen have to—in this rich and glorious land."
"Won't you tell us about it?" asked Eleanore sweetly. "I should be so interested to hear. It's so different, you see, from all I've been accustomed to."
"Yes," Marsh answered grimly, "I've no doubt it is. Go ahead, Sally, and tell them about it."
And Sally did. Gladly taking her husband's aggressive tone, she started out almost with a sneer. Her remarks at first were disjointed and brief, but I told her I was writing the story of her husband's life, that I wanted her side of it from the start. I promised to show her what I wrote and let her cut anything she had told me if she did not want it in print. And so in scattered incidents, with bits thrown in now and then by Marsh, the lives of these two began to come out. And we understood her bitterness.
"Mr. Marsh was born," she said, "in one of the poorest little towns in Southern Iowa. It was nothing but a hole of a place about six miles from the county seat where my father was a lawyer. But even in that little hole his family was the poorest there. I've been all over the States since then, and I've seen poor people, the Lord knows—but I want to say I've never seen people anywhere that were any worse off than my husband was when he was a boy. And yet he got out of it all by himself. He didn't need any strikes to help him."