“Is she alone in the world?”
“No; her mother, also a mill-worker, is alive, but she was disabled for a time, and the girl had to toil for both. In the same mill the mother met with an accident which left her face scarred terribly. She is here now with her daughter. Only yesterday was she let out of prison.”
Hera indicated a bed a few yards away where a woman was kneeling in prayer.
“It is a cruel, often-told tale,” Mario said. “In the days when most of our factories were built the world had not thought much about the moral welfare or health of those obliged to work in them. With our enlightenment about other things, we have learned that forces for combating foes of the public health are as important to the state as the army or navy. New laws are compelling builders of factories to have a care for the health of the workers.”
“The laws that the New Democracy has given the country,” she said, aware that Mario more than any man in Italy had worked to this end.
“Something has been accomplished,” he told her, “but the work is only begun. Do you know what mill this girl worked in?”
“Yes,” she answered, but said no more, and he understood. In all the Tarsis silk-mills child labour was employed.
They saw the woman rise from prayer, look down upon the face of her child, and, with a shriek that resounded through the ward, bringing patients up from their pillows and nurses running to the bedside, fall upon the girl’s body, wailing, and beseeching the ashen lips to speak.
“Don’t go, Giulia! Don’t leave me! You are all I have!”
With the others Hera drew near and yielded to an impulse to speak to the mother so alone in her grief. The sound of her voice hushed the woman’s sobbing. She looked into Hera’s face, heavily at first, then set her gaze more sharply and passed a hand over her brow like one of bewildered senses. Another moment and she sprang to her feet, a malediction on her tongue, and the scar across her eyelid and cheek glowing angrily, as it had that day in the Cathedral square when she shook her fist at Tarsis and his bride.