But unconsciously Sally was always the fellow-worker—Myra—what Myra meant he could feel but not explain; yet these crowded days left little time for thoughts sweet but often intense with pain. He wrote to her rarely—mere jottings of business and health; he rarely heard from her. Her message was invariably the same—the richness and quiet of country life, the depth and peace of rest, the hope that he was well and happy. She never mentioned his paper—though she received every number—and when Joe inquired once whether it came, she answered in a postscript: "The paper? It's in every Monday's mail." This neglect irritated Joe, and he would doubly enjoy Sally's heart-and-soul passion for The Nine-Tenths.
Sally was growing into his working life, day by day. Her presence was stimulating, refreshing. If he felt blue and discouraged, or dried up and in want of inspiration, he merely called her over, and her quiet talk, her sane views, her quick thinking, her never-failing good humor and faith, acted upon him as a tonic.
"Miss Sally," he said once, "what would I ever do without you?"
Sally looked at him with her clear eyes.
"Oh," she said, "I guess you'd manage to stagger along somehow."
But after that she hovered about him like a guardian angel. What bothered her chiefly, when she thought of Joe's work, was her lack of education, and she set about to make this up by good reading, and by attending lectures at night, and by hard study in such time as she could snatch from her work. She and Joe were comrades in the best sense. They could always depend upon each other. It was in some ways as if they were in partnership. And then there was that old tie of the fire to draw them together.
She was of great help in setting him right about the poor.
"People are happy," she would say—"most people are happy. Human nature is bigger than environment—it bubbles up through mud. That's almost the trouble with it. If the poor were only thoroughly unhappy, they'd change things to-morrow. No, Mr. Joe, it's not a question of happiness; it's a question of justice, of right, of progress, of developing people's possibilities. It's all the question of a better life, a richer life. People are sacred—they mustn't be reduced to animals."
And with her aid he gained a truer perspective of the life about him—learned better how to touch it, how to "work" it. The paper became more and more adapted to its audience, and began to spread rapidly. Here and there a labor union would subscribe for it in bulk for all its members, and the Stove Circle soon had many a raw recruit drumming up trade, making house-to-house canvasses. In this way, the circulation finally reached the five-thousand mark. There were certain unions, such as that of the cloak-makers, that regarded the paper as their special oracle—swore by it, used it in their arguments, made it a vital part of their mental life.
This enlarged circulation brought some curious and unlooked-for results. Some of the magazine writers in the district got hold of a copy, had a peep at Joe, heard of his fame, and then took copies up-town to the respectable editors and others, and spread a rumor of "that idiot, Joe Blaine, who runs an underground paper down on Tenth Street." As a passion of the day was slumming, and as nothing could be more piquant than the West Tenth Street establishment, Joe was amused to find automobiles drawing up at his door, and the whole neighborhood watching breathlessly the attack of some flouncy woman or some tailor-made man.