He stared at me. "Miss Wakely," he said in distress, "I must have muddled it awfully. I wasn't clear—"
"Yes," I said, "you were clear. But I thought I'd enjoy keeping on with the proof. May I have a clean cloth for the machine?"
He came over to the typewriter table, and stood looking down at me. I dared not look up, because I was worried about my eyes and what they might have to say. Then he put out his hand, and I gave him mine.
"I'm afraid I'll get typewriter oil on you," I said, "and it's smelly."
He went on with the letters without another word. There were two great envelopes of proof. He never could have got through them alone.
The night that he spoke to the girls, I went over early and slipped in the back seat. The hall was filled; I was glad of that. And as soon as he began speaking I saw that he knew how to talk to them. He was just talking to them about the fundamental of human growth, and how the whole industrial struggle was nothing but the assertion of the right of the workers to growth. He showed this struggle as but one phase of something as wide as life.
"You want a better life, don't you?" he said. "You want to enjoy more, and know more and be more. And the people who can individually get these things by your toil you are set against.... But what are you working for? Food and clothes and a little fun? And your own children? I say that those of you who are working just for these things for yourselves are almost as bad as those who work for their own luxury.... What then? What are we working for? Why, to make the world where all of us can have a better life, and enjoy more, and know more, and be more. And we've got to do this together. And those of us who are not trying to raise the standard for all of us, whether employers or employees, are all outlaws together."
It was wonderful to see how he faced that audience of tired men and women, and kindled them into human beings. It was wonderful to see the hope and then the belief and then the courage come quickening in their eyes, in their faces, in their applause. Afterward they went forward like one person to meet him, to take his hand. While they were with him, they became one person. It was almost as if they became, before his eyes, what he was there to tell them that they could go toward.
I had meant to slip out of the hall afterward. The last thing that I had meant to do was to walk down the aisle and put out my hand. Yet when he had finished, that was what I did.
"You liked it?" he said to me.