It seemed strange to be back at the Maines', staying a fortnight with Rachel while the apartment was being looked for. Nothing had been moved in that house; it was all just the same, only the tone of time was deeper, the furniture more worn, the prints yellower. She asked for and was given the third-floor back room again, though, indeed, Mrs. Maine protested that now that she was famous!... Bessie had changed as little as the house. More grey hairs, somewhat more flesh, a great many more pounds of chocolate creams to her credit—that seemed all. She was still amiable, sleepily agreeable, comely, and lazy. Powhatan, except to grow greyer and leaner, had not altered either. The old servants held on. With some inevitable variations the same people came in the evenings—the Bishop's nephew and the St. Timothy people, and Powhatan's downtown acquaintances, and chance visitors from the other side of Mason and Dixon's.

She noticed a slight difference in the cast of talk. They all seemed uneasily aware that the world was moving. Mostly they disapproved and foreboded. She cast her mind back to that winter of '93-'94. It had been the terrible winter of unemployment, strikes, widespread discontent. She remembered clearly how Powhatan had declaimed then against "upsetters" and what the country was coming to. But now she heard him and the Bishop's nephew agree that anti-Christ and ruin were modern inventions. They sighed for the halcyon past. "Even ten or twelve years ago, sir, men were content enough!"

Rachel—Rachel had not sat still. Rachel had climbed. She was the old Rachel, but sweetened and broadened. There was left something of her old manner; she had her broodings that to the casual eye seemed half-sullen; at the end of long silences she might flare out, send at table or elsewhere a flaming, unexpected arrow, but her old ways were like old clothes, kept half-negligently, worn from habit, while all the time a fairer, more lately woven garment was in the wardrobe. She looked no older; she was slight and brown and somehow velvety. Hagar called her a pansy. She was no longer tragic, or tragedy had become but a dim background, a remembered cloud. And she was the strong, sane, and actual comrade of her children.

Betty and Charley.... Charley was blind. Charley and Betty had changed, changed more than anybody. Betty stood a frank, straight young Diana, what she said and did ringing true. Charley was the student. He had his shelves of Braille, and his mother's eyes and voice were his at call. Just now they were doing general history together—that was what Charley wanted, to be a historian. Charley and Betty claimed Hagar for their own. There were her Christmas letters every year—wonderful letters—and her Christmas gifts, small choice things from every land. They worshipped her, too, with frankness because she had "done something"—because her name counted. Oh, they were very ambitious, Betty and Charley; filled with ideas, glorious for the new time, ready to push the world with vigour! "Oh," cried Hagar, "don't they make you feel timid, cautious, and conservative?"

She watched with interest to see what effect the two had upon Powhatan and Bessie. She was forced to the conclusion that they had very little. They angered Powhatan sometimes, and he would strike the table and deplore the days of silent reverence. But he was desperately proud of Betty's looks, and he had an odd, sneaking pity and fondness for Charley, and Hagar gathered that he would have sadly missed them out of the house. As for Bessie, she only gave her sleepy smile, and said that all children talked foolishly, but that you didn't have to listen.

Upstairs, at bedtime, now in Rachel's room, now in Hagar's the two talked together. Daytime, they looked for Hagar's apartment. They found it at last, high in air, overlooking the great city; roofs and roofs and roofs at a hundred levels; curling streamers of white steam like tossed plumes against the blue sky, bright pennants floating from towering hotel or department store; a clock below a church spire, with a gilt weather-cock far above; blurs of occasional trees seen in some hollow opening; streets far below them, crossing, crossing—percolating rivulets of manikins that were people; roofs and roofs and roofs, and a low perpetual, multitudinous voice; and the sky over all, high and clear and exhilarating the day they found the place. "I am going to utter a bromide," said Hagar. "How marvellous is modern life!"

They went over it again. "Thomasine's room, and a guest-room, and my room, and a fine room for Mary Magazine who is coming—Isham having remarried—to look after us, and two baths and a great big library-study-drawing-room, and a little room for what we please, and plenty of closets, and a quiet and good cafÉ away up on the roof—Rachel, it's fine!" They sat on a window-seat and Rachel produced a pencil and notebook, and together they tinted the walls and laid rugs and hung pictures and ran bookshelves around and furnished the apartment. "There! that's quiet and perfect and not expensive. As Thomson would say, 'It's quite comme il faut, Miss!'"

"Where is Thomson?"

"Mr. Greer, the artist, has taken him over. He wrote me that he was making thousands, throwing the light on millionaires, and especially millionairesses, and that he wanted Thomson, oh, so badly! He's the type that Thomson likes, and so he joined him two months ago at Newport. Dear old Thomson! Mahomet has gone back to Alexandria."

They looked around the big room. "Soft lights at night and all those twinkling stars out there. It's going to be a dear home."

"You'll have people coming about you. Your own sort—"

Hagar laughed. "What is my sort? Everybody's my sort."

"Writers—artists—"

Hagar pondered the mantel-shelf with a view to what should go above it. "I don't know many of them. I know more of them abroad than here. We're a very isolated kind of craftspeople—each of us more or less on a little Robinson Crusoe island of our own. It may be different in New York, I don't know.... We could do a good deal if we'd put our heads together and push the same wheel."

The apartment was not to be furnished in a day. They worked at it in a restful and leisurely manner, and in the midst of operations, Hagar went to see the Josslyns who had a house up on the Sound.

That afternoon she and the Josslyns walked by the water and watched the white sails gliding by the green and rocky shore, then in the evening sat by a wood fire with cider and apples. Monday to Friday the children were in town at their grandmother's, going to school; Friday afternoon they entered the big living-room like a west wind and danced about with their mother. A little later the whole family would go into town; Christopher had had a course of lectures to write and he was doing it better here. The fire crackled and blazed; at night through the open windows came in a dim sound of waves, with passing lights of boats, and the fragrance of the salt sea, beloved by Hagar. On Monday, when the children had gone, she drove with Molly deep into the sweet countryside, and the two talked as the quiet old horse jogged along.... Molly had taken the advice of the woman at Roger Michael's dinner-party three years and more ago. She was an active member of a suffrage organization, deeply interested, beginning to speak. "I'm a good out-of-doors sort. My voice carries and I don't have to strain it. Of course, we're just beginning out-of-doors speaking. I haven't half the intellect I wish I had, but I can give them good, plain doctrine. It's so common-sense, after all! And Christopher helps so much.... Oh, Hagar, when you're truly mated, it's heaven!"

Molly could tell much of the practical working, of the everyday effort and propaganda. "In two weeks we'll be back in town, and then if you'll let me take you here and there—And when we get back to the house I'll show you what I have of the literature we use,—pamphlets, leaflets, and so on,—from John Stuart Mill down to an article Christopher wrote the other day. We broadcast a great amount of it in every state, but if we were rich we could make use of a thousand times more. But we're not rich—whether that's to our damnation or our salvation! We have to make devotion do instead. Then there are the books that help us, and they are coming out constantly now. And every now and then we gain a bit of the press. A number of the magazines help no end. And, of course, we speak and have meetings and work quietly, each among her own acquaintance. It's to educate—educate—educate! We're just at the beginning of things. There were the early stages and the heroic women who blazed the trail. They're all going,—Miss Anthony died last March,—and their time is merging into our time, and now the trail's a roadway and there are thousands on it, and still we're just at the beginning—"

Molly could tell, too, something of the personality of the women eminent in the movement. "The really eminent to-day are not always those whose names the reporters catch, and vice versa. And while the papers talk of 'leaders,' I do not think that, in the man's sense, they are leaders at all. We do not hurrah for any woman as the men do for Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Bryan. The movement goes without high priests and autocrats and personifications. We haven't, I suppose, the Big Chief tradition. Perhaps woman's individualism has a value after all. It's like religion when it really is personal; your idea of good remains your idea of good; it doesn't take on a human form. Or perhaps we're merely tired of crooking the knee. I don't know. The fact remains."

They jogged along by country roads and orchards. "It's the most worth-while thing!" said Molly. "Nobody can explain it, but every one who takes hold of it deep feels it. I heard a woman say the other day that it was like going out of a close room into ozone and wind and the blue lift of the sky. She said she felt as though she had wings! Discouragements? Cartloads of them! But somehow they don't matter. Nor do mistakes. Of course we make them—but the next time we do better."

The witching autumn week with the Josslyns over, Hagar went back to town, and, as she had promised, to the Settlement for three days.

The Settlement! The first day she had seen it came back clearly; the harsh, biting day and the search for Thomasine, and Omega Street, and then how wonderful the old house had seemed to her, going over it with Elizabeth. It was shrunken now, of course, in size and marvel, but it was still a grave and pleasant place of fine uses. She had visited it before during this month, and she had marked certain changes. A few of the people in residence years before were here yet, others were gone, others of later years had come in. But it was not only people; other changes appeared. She found exhibited a deep skepticism of certain DanaÏdes' labours still favoured or tolerated so many years ago. The policies of the place were bolder and larger; every one was at once more radical and more serene.

Marie Caton met her. "Elizabeth has a committee meeting, and then she speaks to-night at Cooper Union: Women in the Sweated Trades. I haven't had you to myself hardly ever! Now I'm going to."

"Can't I go to Cooper Union to-night?"

"Oh, yes! I'm going, too. It's an important meeting. But I've got you for a whole two hours, and nowadays that's a long and restful sojourn together! Get your things off and we'll take possession of Elizabeth's sitting-room."

In Elizabeth's room, with her books, with the Psyche and the Botticelli Judith and the Mona Lisa and the drawing of the Sphinx, they talked of twenty things, finally of the Settlement's specific activities, old ones carried on, new ones embarked in; then, "But more and more you get drawn—or I get drawn—into the ocean of China Awake."

"China Awake?"

"Women Awake. It's an ocean all right, with an ocean's possibilities."

"I don't think it's women only who are waking, Marie. Women and men, all of us—"

"I agree," said Marie. "But it wasn't just natural sleepy-headedness with women. They've been drugged—given knock-out drops, so to speak. They have a long way to wake up."

Hagar mused, her eyes upon the drawing. "Yes, a good, long way.... There must have been a lot of pristine strength."

"Well, it's coming out. All kinds of things are coming out with an accent on qualities they didn't think she had."

"Yes. The world is rather in the position of the hen with the duckling—"

"The kind of thing we read and hear at this place emphasizes, of course, the economic and sociological side. It's to be the Century of Fair Distribution, of Social Organization, of Humanism—ergo, Woman Also. Which, of course, is all right, but I'd put an infinite plus to that."

"And Elizabeth?"

"Oh, Elizabeth is a saint! What she thinks of is the sweated woman and the little children, and the girl who goes under—most often is pushed under. It's what we see down here; it's the starved bodies and minds, the slow dying of fatigue, the monstrous wrong of the Things Withheld that's moving her. Of course, we all think of that. How can any thinking woman not think of that? She wants the vote to use as a lever, and so do I, and so do you.... But behind all that, in the place where I myself live," said Marie, with sudden passion, "I am fighting to be myself! I am fighting for that same right for the other woman! I am fighting for plain recognition of an equal humanity!"

There was a crowd that night at Cooper Union. Elizabeth spoke; a grave, strong talk, followed with attention, clapped with sincerity. After her there spoke an A. F. of L. man. "Women have got to unionize. They've got to learn to keep step. They've got to learn that the good of one is wrapped up in the good of all. They've got to learn to strike. They've got to learn to strike not only for themselves, but for the others. They've got to get off their little, just-standing-room islands, and think in terms of continents. They've got to get an idea of solidarity—"

When he had taken his seat came an announcement, made with evident satisfaction. "We did not know it until a few minutes ago. We thought she was still in the West—but we are so fortunate as to have with us to-night—Rose Darragh!" Applause broke forth at once.