He set himself seriously to work to get at the real
conditions that were causing the ferment of unrest among the working
classes. He made himself familiar with socialistic and labor newspapers;
he attended mass meetings; he laid awake nights reading and wrestling
with the problems of organized industrialism. His honest resentment
against the injustice shown the laboring man was always nicely balanced
by his intolerance of the haste and ignorance and misrepresentation of
the labor agitators. He was one of the few men who could be called upon
to arbitrate differences, whom both factions invariably pronounced
"square." When pressure was brought to bear upon him to return to
Clarke's, he was in a position to dictate his own terms.
It was the second week after his reinstatement that he came up to the
office one day and unexpectedly encountered Nance Molloy. At first he did
not recognize the tall young lady in the well-cut brown suit with the bit
of fur at the neck and wrists and the jaunty brown hat with its dash of
gold. Then she looked up, and it was Nance's old smile that flashed out
at him, and Nance's old impulsive self that turned to greet him.
For one radiant moment all that had happened since they last stood there
was swept out of the memory of each; then it came back; and they shook
hands awkwardly and could find little to say to each other in the
presence of the strange stenographer who occupied Nance's old place at
the desk by the window.
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