"Yes, I am!" Susan returned his smile with another. "I could no more go home now than after the first act of a play!" she confessed.
"Isn't it damned interesting?" he said, walking on.
"Why, yes," she said. "It's real at last--it's the realest thing I ever saw in my life! Everything's right on the surface, and all kept within certain boundaries. In other places, people come and go in your lives. Here, everybody's your neighbor. I like it! It could be perfect; just fancy if the Carrolls had one house, and you another, and I a third, and Phil and his wife a fourth--wouldn't it be like children playing house! And there's another thing about it, Billy," Susan went on enthusiastically, "it's honest! These people are really worried about shoes and rent and jobs--there's no money here to keep them from feeling everything! Think what a farce a strike would be if every man in it had lots of money! People with money CAN'T get the taste of really living!"
"Ah, well, there's a lot of sin and wretchedness here now!" he said sadly. "Women drinking--men acting like brutes! But some day, when the liquor traffic is regulated, and we have pension laws, and perhaps the single tax---"
"And the Right-Reverend William Lord Oliver, R. I., in the Presidential Chair, hooray and Glory be to God---!" Susan began.
"Oh, you dry up, Susan," Billy said laughing. "I don't care," he added contentedly. "I like to be at the bottom of things, shoving up. And my Lord, if we only pull this thing off---!"
"It's not my preconceived idea of a strike," Susan said, after a moment's silence. "I thought one had to throw coal, and run around the streets with a shawl over one's head---"
"In the east, where the labor is foreign, that's about it," he said, "but here we have American-born laborers, asking for their rights. And I believe it's all coming!"
"But with ignorance and inefficiency on one hand, and graft and cruelty on the other, and drink and human nature and poverty adding their complications, it seems rather a big job!" Susan said. "Now, look at these small kids out of bed at this hour of night, Bill! And what are they eating?--Boiled crabs! And notice the white stockings--I never had a pair in my life, yet every kidlet on the block is wearing them. And look upstairs there, with a bed still airing!"
"The wonder is that it's airing at all," Billy said absently. "Is that the boys coming back?" he asked sharply.