“Oh, I’m not going to meddle with the strike. The very suggestion that I would wish to have anything to do with settling the difficulty makes me laugh.”
Salome rose and began to pace the room. “But sometimes, lately, aunty, it has occurred to me that a young woman of average talent, with a great business on her hands which employs two thousand people, may have something to do in life more than to seek her own selfish enjoyment—a pursuit which, after all, is not elevating and leaves but a restless, unsatisfied spirit in its wake. I came across some of grandfather’s manuscripts two or three weeks ago and have been reading them. He wasn’t like papa. The mills were a part of his very self. The operatives were almost like so many children to him. I’ve read in his, and in other books, about the mill-girls of his day. Girls whose working days began at daylight in winter and ended at half-past seven in the evening; who had only two dresses to their backs, and those of Merrimack print; whose profits for a week, after their board was paid, were only two dollars. But girls who could discuss Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton at their looms; who read Locke and Abercrombie and Pollock and Young (something I can’t do!); who sent petitions to Congress for the abolition of slavery; who helped build churches from their pitiful savings; who wrote essays and poems and stories, even while running their looms; who spent their evenings in the study of German and French and botany; and who went out, at last, to become teachers and mothers and missionaries, and, above all, noble, self-sacrificing, helpful women. And I tell you that, with all my money and my polished education, I envy them.”
“Salome, really, you surprise me,” exclaimed the excellent lady who was listening to her. “Calm yourself, my dear.”
“Look at the girls in this mill—in my grandfather’s mill to-day—in my mill,” she went on. “Beings of bangs and bangles and cheap jewelry, of low aspirations, and correspondingly low morals! They are not to blame for their penny-dreadful lives, because they know no better. They dream of nothing higher than their looms and their face-powder, and their cheap satins and false hair—why should they? They see rich and educated women like us wrapped entirely in ourselves, each anxious to outshine the rest, and all seemingly lost in the mad race after fashionable attire. They do not know, poor things, that we ever think or talk of higher subjects. I tell you, I feel that I am, somehow, responsible for them. And yet, I don’t know how to help them. My grandfather could, but I can’t.”
“I know nothing of such things,” coldly replied her aunt. “It is not ladylike to fly into a passion over the fancied wrongs of a lower order of beings. I beg that you will recollect that you are the daughter of Cora Le Bourdillon and Floyd Shepard.”
“And more than that,” Salome whispered to herself as she sought the quiet of her own room, “I am afraid I am the grand-daughter of Newbern Shepard.”
IV.
It was nearly eight o’clock when carriage-wheels were heard coming up the graveled drive-way, and Otis Greenough and his associates were announced. Salome and her aunt were sitting in the music-room, and came forward at once; the former with an unmistakable air of eagerness.
“Tell me about the strike, Mr. Greenough,” she asked, before he had fairly seated himself.
“Oh, then, you’d heard of it, eh?” he asked.