Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/307

 necessary that someone should begin to weaken. He said, "Does one ever know what one does?"

"Ah, indeed!" said the father. "You don't know what you do?"

"There are moments," answered Jean, "when one loses his head, and afterwards I don't say one should not have regrets."

"For the matter of losing one's head, I know only one thing: It is that they pay you, and it is up to you always to obey whatever they command."

The mother watched the chocolate, from which the steam rose with a warmth of strong nutriment. They loved that in the family, like a Sunday morning indulgence, like a bourgeois chocolate for holiday folk. She said, "Anyhow, let it be as it will, he's got to eat."

Jean went on to speak. His blue eyes had undergone the first transformation which comes in a man's life, when he is no longer Jean, son of Pierre, pupil at the Central school, but Jean Bousset, engineer of applied chemistry. There remained in them, however, the shining of a young girl, that emotion which wakens two rays of sunlight in a spring. And now they kept a sort of supplication, like the sweetness of a naked infant.

"Oh, I know everything that you are going to say. You cannot excuse me, because you are not in my place, and I cannot condemn a movement of my heart. You know—I wrote it to you—the workers were about to go on strike. At once I said to myself that these were matters which did not concern me; because, when you are taking care of yourself, it is not necessary to look any farther. But Cousin François explained it all to me."

"Ah, I told you so!" cried Pierre Bousset. "When you wanted to take Cousin François into your factory,