Fully a
third of those present were women, some of them plainly from the
mills and some of them curiously different--women from other
walks in life who had thrown themselves heart and soul into the
strike. Without ceremony but with much laughing and joking, they
found their places around the tables. A cook, who appeared in a
dim doorway was greeted with a shout, to which he responded with
a wide smile, waving the long spoon which he held in his hand.
I shall not attempt to give any complete description of the
gathering or of what they said or did. I think I could devote a
dozen pages to the single man who was placed next to me. I was
interested in him from the outset. The first thing that struck me
about him was an air of neatness, even fastidiousness, about his
person--though he wore no stiff collar, only a soft woollen shirt
without a necktie. He had the long sensitive, beautiful hands of
an artist, but his face was thin and marked with the pallor
peculiar to the indoor worker. I soon learned that he was a
weaver in the mills, an Englishman by birth, and we had not
talked two minutes before I found that, while he had never had
any education in the schools, he had been a gluttonous reader of
books-- all kind of books--and, what is more, had thought about
them and was ready with vigorous (and narrow) opinions about this
author or that.
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