"Cossy!" she cried. "Oh, Cossy! I mean Cosma."
"You call me whatever you want to," I said, and kissed her.
Bert and Henny came roaring out at me. They filled the kitchen with their bodies and voices. Father kissed me. They sat with me, while Mother brought me some supper.
"Flossy dress, sis," Henny offered easily. "Day after to-morrow," he said, when I asked him when he was going back to his work. "We've got a committee to meet with a committee of the traction folks. We may be hot in it in another week." And when I asked, in what, he added: "Oh, we've got some fines and dockings and cuts in wages to fix up, and they're trying to make us pay more for our dynamite—you wouldn't understand."
I turned and looked at my brothers. For some reason, never until that moment had it occurred to me to count them in with those of us who were dreaming new dreams for labor. They had been simply my brothers, ugly, irritable, teasing. But they were laborers with whom, as strangers, I could make common cause. Bert's great figure and dead eyes and brutalized mouth were the figure and eyes and mouth of "The Puddler," which I had lately gone to an art gallery to see!
"I tell you," Father said, "there's new times coming for you fellows, or I miss my guess. I say it every day when I read the papers."
So then we talked, Father and Henry and Bert and I. For the first time in our years together, we spoke of these matters and listened to one another. This was talk such as would have been impossible while I stayed there, either idle or drudging. Now I was a person, and we could exchange impressions. It came to me what family meetings might be, if each one were engaged in some happy, chosen toil, with its interests to exchange. And warm in me came welling and throbbing an understanding of them all, as fellow human beings, fellow workers, a relationship which the sense of family had hitherto obstructed and bound.
Presently Father and the boys went away.
"Let's sit down a while and talk," Mother said to me, turning her back on the dishes. "Shall we go in the parlor?" she asked.