The dance was even more tiresome than Jane had anticipated.
There had been little pleasure in outshining the easily outshone belles of Remsen City.She had felt humiliated by having to divide the honors with a brilliantly beautiful and scandalously audacious Chicago girl, a Yvonne Hereford--whose style, in looks, in dress and in wit, was more comfortable to the standard of the best young men of Remsen City--a standard which Miss Hastings, cultivated by foreign travel and social adventure, regarded as distinctly poor, not to say low.Miss Hereford's audacities were especially offensive to Jane.Jane was audacious herself, but she flattered herself that she had a delicate sense of that baffling distinction between the audacity that is the hall mark of the lady and the audacity that proclaims the not-lady.For example, in such apparently trifling matters as the way of smoking a cigarette, the way of crossing the legs or putting the elbows on the table or using slang, Jane found a difference, abysmal though narrow, between herself and Yvonne Hereford.
``But then, her very name gives her away,'' reflected Jane.
``There'd surely be a frightfully cheap streak in a mother who in this country would name her daughter Yvonne--or in a girl who would name herself that.''
However, Jane Hastings was not deeply annoyed either by the shortcomings of Remsen City young men or by the rivalry of Miss Hereford.Her dissatisfaction was personal--the feeling of futility, of cheapness, in having dressed herself in her best and spent a whole evening at such unworthy business.``Whatever I am or am not fit for,'' said she to herself, ``I'm not for society--any kind of society.At least I'm too much grown-up mentally for that.'' Her disdainful thoughts about others were, on this occasion as almost always, merely a mode of expressing her self-scorn.
As she was undressing she found in her party bag the dodger Hull had got for her from Victor Dorn.She, sitting at her dressing table, started to read it at once.But her attention soon wandered.``I'm not in the mood,'' she said.``To-morrow.''
And she tossed it into the top drawer.The fact was, the subject of politics interested her only when some man in whom she was interested was talking it to her.In a general way she understood things political, but like almost all women and all but a few men she could fasten her attention only on things directly and clearly and nearly related to her own interests.
Politics seemed to her to be not at all related to her--or, indeed, to anybody but the men running for office.This dodger was politics, pure and simple.A plea to workingmen to awaken to the fact that their STRIKES were stupid and wasteful, that the way to get better pay and decent hours of labor was by uniting, taking possession of the power that was rightfully theirs and regulating their own affairs.
She resumed fixing her hair for the night.Her glance bent steadily downward at one stage of this performance, rested unseeingly upon the handbill folded printed side out and on top of the contents of the open drawer.She happened to see two capital letters-- S.G.--in a line by themselves at the end of the print.She repeated them mechanically several times--``S.G.
--S.G.--S.G.''--then her hands fell from her hair upon the handbill.She settled herself to read in earnest.
``Selma Gordon,'' she said.``That's different.''
She would have had some difficulty in explaining to herself why it was ``different.'' She read closely, concentratedly now.She tried to read in an attitude of unfriendly criticism, but she could not.A dozen lines, and the clear, earnest, honest sentences had taken hold of her.How sensible the statements were, and how obviously true.Why, it wasn't the writing of an ``anarchistic crank'' at all--on the contrary, the writer was if anything more excusing toward the men who were giving the drivers and motormen a dollar and ten cents a day for fourteen hours'
work--``fourteen hours!'' cried Jane, her cheeks burning--yes, Selma Gordon was more tolerant of the owners of the street car line than Jane herself would have been.
When Jane had read, she gazed at the print with sad envy in her eyes.``Selma Gordon can think--and she can write, too,'' said she half aloud.``I want to know her--too.''
That ``too'' was the first admission to herself of a curiously intense desire to meet Victor Dorn.
``Oh, to be in earnest about something! To have a real interest!
To find something to do besides the nursery games disguised under new forms for the grown-up yet never to be grown-up infants of the world.``And THAT kind of politics doesn't sound shallow and dull.There's heart in it--and brains--real brains--not merely nasty little self-seeking cunning.'' She took up the handbill again and read a paragraph set in bolder type:
``The reason we of the working class are slaves is because we haven't intelligence enough to be our own masters, let alone masters of anybody else.The talk of equality, workingmen, is nonsense to flatter your silly, ignorant vanity.We are not the equals of our masters.They know more than we do, and naturally they use that knowledge to make us work for them.So, even if you win in this strike or in all your strikes, you will not much better yourselves.Because you are ignorant and foolish, your masters will scheme around and take from you in some other way what you have wrenched from them in the strike.
``Organize! Think! Learn! Then you will rise out of the dirt where you wallow with your wives and your children.Don't blame your masters; they don't enslave you.They don't keep you in slavery.Your chains are of your own forging and only you can strike them off!''
Certainly no tenement house woman could be lazier, emptier of head, more inane of life than her sister Martha.``She wouldn't even keep clean if it wasn't the easiest thing in the world for her to do, and a help at filling in her long idle day.''
