"I happen to know about you, Mr. Blaine…. You were the head of that printing-place that burnt down…."
Joe felt a shock go through him, as if he had seen a ghost….
"Well, maybe you did all you could for your men;… maybe you were a good employer…. Yet see what came of it…." Suddenly Lissner's voice rose passionately: "And yet you had the nerve to come around and get after us fellows, who were just as good as you. There are bad employers, and bad employees, too—bad people of every kind—but maybe most people are good. You couldn't help what happened to you; neither can we help it if the struggle is too fierce—we're victims, too. It's conditions, it's life. We can't change the world in a day. And yet you—after your fire—come here and ruin us."
Joe was shaken to his depths. Lissner had made an overstatement, and yet he had thrown a new light on the strike, and he had reminded Joe of his long-forgotten guilt. And suddenly Joe knew. All are guilty; all share in the corruption of the world—the laborer anxious for mass-tyranny and distrustful of genius, the aristocrat afraid of soiling his hands, the capitalist intent on power and wealth, the artist neglectful of all but a narrow artifice, each one limited by excess or want, by intellect or passion, by vanity or lust, and all struggling with one another to wrest some special gift for himself. In the intricacy of civilization there are no real divisions, but every man is merely a brain cell, a nerve, in the great organism, and what one man gains, some other must lose. It was a world he got a glimpse of quite different from that sharp twofold world of the workers and the money-power, a world of infinite gradations, a world merely the child of the past, where high and low were pushed by the resistless pressure of environment, and lives were shaped by birth, chance, training, position, and a myriad, myriad indefinable forces.
All of this confused him at first, and it had been so long since he had dealt with theories that it was some time before the chaos cleared, some time before the welter of new thought took shape in his mind. But it made him humble, receptive, teachable, it made him more kindly and more gentle. He began a mental stock-taking; he began to examine into the lives about him.
Myra was there—the new Myra, a Myra with daily less to do in that office, and with more and more time to think. From her heart was lifted the hard hand of circumstance, releasing a tenderness and yearning which flooded her brain. It was a tragic time for her. She knew now that her services were nearly at an end, and that she must go her own way. She would not be near Joe any longer—she would not have the heart's ease of his presence—she could no longer brood over him and protect him.
It seemed to her that she could not bear the future. Her love for Joe rose and overwhelmed her. She became self-conscious before him, paled when he spoke to her, and when he was away her longing for him was insupportable. She wanted him now—all her life cried out for him—all the woman in her went out to mate with this man. The same passion that had drawn her from the country to his side now swayed and mastered her.
"Joe! Joe!" her soul cried, "take me now! This is too much for me to bear!"
And more and more the thought of his health oppressed her. If she only had the power to take him to her breast, draw him close in her arms, mother him, heal him, smooth the wrinkles, kiss the droop of the big lips, and pour her warm and infinite love into his heart. That surely must save him—love surely would save this man.
She began to scheme and dream—to plot ways of getting about him, of routing him out, of tearing him from his rut.