The rain had begun to fall again and the fog had settled like a pall over everything farther off than the arched gateway. She wondered if all those people were still standing in the mud and rain.
An elderly lady, with soft white hair and exquisite laces, came in.
Salome ran forward, pushed her aunt’s favorite chair into the position she liked best, and put her into it.
“Why did you stop playing? And why did you attempt that brilliant thing?” said Mrs. Soule. “You are so dreadfully out of practice, you know.”
“It wasn’t that,” answered the younger woman; “I’m not in the mood for playing anything. I doubt if I could get through with ‘Bounding Billows’ or the ‘Fifteenth Amusement’ to-day. Did you know, aunty, there is a strike down at the mills?”
“A strike! Mercy, who has struck?” responded the elder in shocked tones.
“Why, the operatives, of course. I don’t know why, or anything about it. I have never shown any interest in the mills,” she went on eagerly and half-apologetically, “but I should like to know what it is all about—why they did it—what they want, and all that. I should think Mr. Greenough would come up here.”
“He will come as soon as he deems it proper.” Mrs. Soule’s voice was calmness and precision itself. “It is not nice for young ladies to mix themselves up in such common things.”
“But, aunty,” laughed Salome, “strikes are not common things here. We never had one before. And I am not so very young a lady as to need the same careful guardianship I had when I was sixteen. I am twenty-seven years old.”
“There is no need of saying so upon all occasions, if you are,” replied her aunt with some asperity. “A strike, like all things connected with, or originated by the ignorant laboring class, is common in the sense of being vulgar. Any woman, young or old, brought up as delicately and carefully as you have been, demeans herself by connection with such things. You have an agent—a manly and capable one; leave the settlement of such things to him.”