even be aristocratic; only small boys and persons of slack breeding
are guilty of the grin. ... Ruth Frazer's grin was neither common nor
vulgar. It was warming, encouraging, bright with the flashing of a
quick mind, and withal sweet, womanly, delicious. Yet that it was a
grin cannot be denied. Enemies to the grin must make the most of it.

The grin was to be seen, for Dulac had just entered Ruth's mother's
parlor, and it glowed for him. The man seemed out of place in that
cottage parlor. He seemed out of place in any homelike room, in any
room not filled by an eager, sweating, radical crowd of men assembled
to hang upon his words. That was the place for him, the place nature
had created him to become. To see him standing alone any place, on
the street, in a hotel, affected one with the feeling that he was
exotic there, misplaced. He must be surrounded by his audience to be
RIGHT.

Something of this crossed Ruth's mind. No woman, seeing a possible
man, is without her sentimental speculation. She could not conceive
of Dulac in a HOME.

"It's been a day!" he said.

"Yes."

"Every skilled mechanic has struck," he said, with pride, as in a
personal achievement. "And most of the rest. To-night four thousand
out of their five thousand men were with us."

"It came so suddenly. Nobody thought of a strike this morning."