Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/125

 one man. The woman was Irene Shane. The man was Stepan Krylenko. The woman was rich. The man was a Mill worker who toiled twelve hours a day and gave six hours more to the education of his fellow workers.

The years and the great progress had been no more kind to Irene than they had been to the Town. She aged. . . dryly, after the fashion of spinsters who have diverted the current of life from its wide course into a single narrow channel of feverish activity. She grew thinner and more pale. There were times when the blue veins showed beneath the transparent skin like the rivers of a schoolboy's map. Her pale blond hair lost its luster and grew thin and straight, because she had not time and even less desire to care for it. Her hands were red and worn with the work she did in helping the babies of the Flats to live. She dressed the same, always in a plain gray suit and ugly black hat, which she replaced when they became worn and shabby. But in replacing them, she ignored the changing styles. The models remained the same, rather outmoded and grotesque, so that in the Town they rewarded her for her work among the poor by regarding her as queer and something of a figure of fun.

Yet she retained a certain virginal look, and in her eye there was a queer exalted light. Since life is impossible without compensations of one sort or another, it is probable that Irene had her share of these. She must have found peace in her work and satisfaction in the leader she molded from the tow haired boy who years before had shouted insults at her through the wrought iron gates of Shane's Castle.

For Krylenko had grown into a remarkable man. He spoke English perfectly. He worked with Irene, a leader among his own people. He taught the others. He read Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and even Voltaire. . . books which Irene bought him in ignorance of their flaming contents. At twenty-five Stepan Krylenko was a leader in the district, and in the Town there were men of property who had heard vaguely of him as a disturber, an anarchist, a madman, a Socialist, a criminal.

Although Irene seldom penetrated the Town any longer and her mother never left the confines of Shane's Castle, their