Tom paused.
"There's no sense doing a thing of that kind," she went on. "Here we are just beginning to have things a little comfortable. You know well enough what Foley can do to you if you get him down on you."
"Well?" Tom said guardedly.
"Well, don't you be that foolish again. We can't afford it."
"I'll see about it." He went into the sitting-room and returned with hat and overcoat on. "I'm going over to Barry's for awhile—on some business," he said, and went out.
Barry and Pete, who boarded with the Barrys, were waiting in the sitting-room when Tom arrived,—and with them sat Mrs. Barry and a boy of about thirteen and a girl apparently a couple of years younger, the two children with idle school books in their laps. Mrs. Barry's sitting-room, also her parlor, would not have satisfied that amiable lady, the president of the Society for Instructing Wage-Earners in House Furnishing. There was a coarse red Smyrna rug in the middle of the floor; a dingy, blue-flowered sofa, with three chairs to match (the sort seen in the windows of cheap furniture stores on bargain days, marked "Nineteen dollars for Set"); a table in one corner, bearing a stack of photographs and a glass vase holding up a bunch of pink paper roses; a half dozen colored prints in gilt-and-white plaster frames. The room, however, quite satisfied Mrs. Barry, and the amiable president of the S. I. W. E. H. F. would needs have given benign approval to the room's utter cleanliness.
Mrs. Barry, a big, red-faced woman, greeted Tom heartily. Then she turned to the boy and girl. "Come on, children. We've got to chase ourselves. The men folks want to talk." She drove the two before her wide body into the kitchen.
Tom plunged into the middle of what he had to say. "We've talked about Foley a lot—all of us. We've said other unions are managed decently, honestly—why shouldn't ours be? We've said we didn't like Foley's bulldozing ways. We didn't like the tough gang he's got into the union. We didn't like the rough-house meetings. We didn't like his grafting. We've said we ought to raise up and kick him out. And then, having said that much, we've gone back to work—me, you and all the rest of us—and he's kept on bullying us, and using the union as a lever to pry off graft. I'm dead sick of this sort of business. For one, I'm tired talking. I'm ready for doing."
"Sure, we're all sick o' Foley. But what d'you think we ought to do?" queried Barry.