At the sight of Willie, she halted for a moment winking at him in a purely involuntary fashion.
“Your mother is so much better,” she said bridling. “Aren’t you delighted?”
Willie’s answer was an inarticulate grunt.
“I’ve come to hear all about the funeral,” she continued in her bustling manner. “I would have gone myself except for the weather. Now sit down like a good boy and tell me all about.” She too treated him as an anemic child still wearing curls.
Willie shook her hand politely. “My mother will tell you,” he said. “I have told her everything.”
And he slipped from the room leaving the two women, the ferret and the mountain, to put the finishing touches upon the obsequies of Julia Shane.
XLVII
IN the house at Cypress Hill the two sisters stayed on to await the settlement of the will proceedings.
The state of siege continued unrelieved, and as the winter advanced, as if Nature herself were hostile to the strikers, there came that year no January thaw at all. There was only more snow and unbroken cold so that Irene, instead of finding freedom with the death of her mother, encountered only more duties among the wretched inhabitants of Halsted street. The Harrisons and Judge Weissman evicted a score of families from houses owned by the Mills. Bag and baggage, women and children, were thrust out into the frozen street to find refuge in other squalid houses already far too crowded.
Judge Weissman also saw to it that the strikers were unable to secure a hall in which to meet. When the men attempted to congregate in the streets, they were charged and clubbed by the constabulary. When they sought to meet in vacant lots, Judge Weissman saw to it that the owners ordered them off. When there was a fire, the strikers were charged by the Town papers with having set it. When there was a riot, it was always the strikers who caused it. But there was one charge which the Town found, above all others, unforgivable. The editors accused the workmen of obstructing progress. They charged the strikers with menacing prosperity and injuring the “boom spirit.” The Rotary Club and the Benevolent Order of Elks, the Chamber of Commerce, even the Episcopal church (very high and much given to incense and genuflexions) espoused the cause of prosperity.