"I talked with her when night came on. She wasn't but thirty-three. In the last five years she told me she hadn't had a new thing to wear. She hadn't been anywhere, not to ride in a buggy or on a train. She hadn't felt well, she told me, not really well, since her first child was born.
"And there was that family held there, as I've been trying to explain to you," he pounded his fist on the table, "held in the peonage that's slavery. There aren't any debtors' prisons to-day with walls about them; but there're millions of debtors' prisons, little sordid cabins on little plots of land, that are locking tired slaves within their bounds to-day."
The man sat down and Kathleen was on her feet. "Break the walls down!" she cried. "Take them our message as workers to break down the walls and join in the social revolution."
There was loud applause and Kathleen dropped back, her face flushed, her gray eyes gleaming.
The meeting over, the Irishwoman was the center of a group of excited talkers. Hertha slipped into the background and watched the people gesticulating and arguing. There were a few burly Irish among them, men in the building trades, who found a chance to laugh in the midst of their debate; but the majority were spare, hollow-cheeked Jews; tailors, small tradesmen, lawyers, eager, often aggressive personalities. The women were in the minority, and offered a contrast to the girls Hertha had seen at the theater or parading the street. They were all simply dressed, usually in white, somewhat mussy shirtwaists, with cheap, ill-hanging skirts. Men and women, however, despite their shabby clothes, were all intensely virile spirits to whom the story of the evening had been a living fact; not a tale to weep over and forget, but a truth to grip and to remedy.
"Come up to the platform with me, Kathleen," one of the women said, "and meet the comrade from the South." Kathleen started to go, and then, glancing back at Hertha, who had dropped into a seat, shook her head. "No, I'll be off with my friend," she answered, and the two made their way out. A few minutes' walk in the reviving air brought them to their home.
"Goodness," Kathleen exclaimed, as she took off her coat, "we forgot the ice cream!"
"Never mind," Hertha answered, "it's cold for ice cream. Sit down and I'll make some cocoa," and she started to walk into the kitchen.
Kathleen followed her. "I'll make the cocoa myself."
"No you won't," Hertha declared. "You got the dinner and it's my turn now."