"I wonder if she's got over it," Mrs. Payton speculated, wistfully. She was glad, for her part, that the bride and bridegroom had gone abroad, and she did not have to see them—"especially Laura!" she used to say to herself, bitterly. If Fred was bitter, she didn't show it; she was absorbed in league work, and a really growing real-estate business; it was all she could do to find time to listen when her mother talked, and talked, and talked—or people, or puzzles, or parlor-maids! But how could she fail to listen—no matter how dull and foolish the talk was—remembering that midnight of pity?
"Freddy is getting very companionable," Mrs. Payton told Arthur Weston. He had come upon Fred bending over a puzzle spread out on the big table in the sitting-room, and trying to fit one wriggly piece of blue after another into a maliciously large expanse of uncharted sky; she had been obviously relieved at the chance to shift the entertainment of Mrs. Payton to his shoulders.
"I've got to go to a league meeting," she excused herself. When she had gone and he was standing with his back to the fire, sipping his tea and talking pleasantly of the weather, or the barber's children, or poor Flora's tendency to put too much starch in the table linen (raising his voice, in a matter-of-fact way, when there was a noise behind the door of the other room), he agreed warmly with Mrs. Payton's tribute to her daughter: "Freddy is getting companionable."
"Indeed she is!" he said, and added that she was remarkably clever about puzzles—which pleased Mrs. Payton very much. This new sense of sympathy which held Fred down to picture puzzles, made her try to avoid topics on which she knew she and her mother could not agree. As the winter went on, the especial topic to be avoided was a strike among the rubber workers. Fred was passionately for the strikers, who were all girls. She went constantly to Hazelton, where the factory was, to give what help she could to the union women, and to admonish them that the way to cure industrial conditions, which all fair-minded people admitted were frightful, was by the ballot.
"Get the man's ballot, and you'll get the man's wages!" was her slogan—and she was quite fierce with her man of business when he pointed out the economic fallacy of her words.
"The kingdom of God cometh not by the ballot," he admonished her.
"I feel as if I were going to Sunday-school!"
"A little Sunday-school wouldn't hurt you. It never seems to strike you," he ruminated, "that if 'laws,' which you are so anxious to have a hand in making, could settle supply and demand, the men, poor creatures, would have feathered their own nests a little better."
To which Miss Payton replied, concisely, "Rot!"—and continued to tell the strikers that suffrage was a cure-all.
It was in March that one of the morning papers announced, with snobbish detail, that Miss Freddy Payton, a "young society girl," had "patrolled" to keep off scabs. That evening, at dinner, Mrs. Payton, mortified to death at the notoriety, and encouraged by Arthur Weston's presence at the table, ventured into controversy: