Salome Shepard had waked at an early hour that morning and found herself unable to sleep again. Her mind was alive with gratitude for the part she had been able to play the night before, with apprehension for the future, and with increasing self-accusation for the state of things in the Shawsheen Mills, both past and present.
“Pshaw!” she said to herself while dressing, true to her habit of communing with her own conscience in default of a visible mentor, “how can I be blamed for the state of things here? The entire business of the mills was put out of my hands by my father’s will. I could have done no differently.”
“You could,” replied that sternest of modern inquisitors—a New England conscience. “It was in your power to see that the moral and physical condition of these people was improved and cultivated. It was in your power to give them better homes and more privileges. It was in your power to raise their standards of life and to create new ones. But you have ignored their very existence, and let them live a mean and sordid life of unremitting toil, in order to furnish you with money to live a selfish life of luxurious ease.”
Salome tied the blue ribbons to her wrapper, and giving her crimps a last touch went down to breakfast.
Knowing she would be opposed, she said nothing of her plans for the morning to her aunt, but simply announced, after they had left the table, that she was going for a long walk.
Then she went upstairs and put on the plainest costume she owned (which, by the way, was a tailor-made gown that had cost her one hundred and fifty dollars), and started for the tenement houses where her operatives lived.
It did not occur to her to feel any fear; nor that the miscreants who had planned the explosion for the previous night might be watching her footsteps. She felt it incumbent upon her to see for herself exactly how these people lived, and what they were bearing and suffering in consequence of the strike.
In the bright glare of the morning sun, the tenement houses had never looked so dingy and mean. They were built in Newbern Shepard’s day, and had received but very few repairs since that time. Although it was cold January weather, Salome counted a dozen panes of glass gone from the first house, and noticed that the lower hinge to the front door was broken. It was a two-story wooden building with four tenements of four rooms each.
She ascended the rickety steps and rapped on the door. One of the women saw her from a front window and came to the door, holding it open only so far as to permit her to see the strange caller.