But the Tollivers were too close to permit his saying more.
Nursing his unsettling sense of guilt, until he was sure his face must publish the amorous errancy, he took himself to Jane on the accustomed Friday evening. She had not marked his absences, accepting the explanation that the report had kept him busied. To his wonderment, she was as dear and essentially desirable as ever; her range of attractiveness lay in ways so remote from Louise's red and feverish charm, that he sensed no conflict between them; he could love both wholly for their differing appeals.
Yet the evening was different, to him. The memory of intimate contacts with the brief love who had gone left a mental stigma upon his body; he was less willing than ever to touch Jane, or think of kissing her; she must be kept all the more congealed in icy protection. As defense against unnerving personal confidences, he had brought his report, which had begun to trouble him, to ask her help and counsel. "I'm afraid of it, Jane. You see, it goes all the way ... about my own father. It'll be bound to make trouble for him ... and me. I could have another inspector frame the final wording----"
"You back out! You must be a changeling some corporation elf has dumped off on me!"
"Don't tease. The thing bites too hard; it has nothing but teeth."
"Of course you'll make it! Give it here; we'll fix it so that it can masticate the toughest corporation board. What if it does make trouble? It's the truth...."
She went over the whole of it, toning down the vituperative rhetoric of the opening and conclusion, adding force to his presentation of facts. He was startled at her ability to vivify the abstractions symbolizing the red rage tearing apart city and mountain. Before she was done, he was re-converted to faith in his eloquent accusations.
At length it was finished. He saw that advance copies reached the papers on the day it was received by the governor. The _Advertiser_ and the _Times-Dispatch_ did not even mention it. But the ever-helpful _Register_ more than made up for their censoring. The slashing indictment of the companies for their disregard of the protective laws, the startling story of their lobbies to defeat safety measures, even the account of his father's activity at the State Federation of Labor, with the advertisements in the _Voice of Labor_ as exhibits, were given in full. This was a new frankness in Adamsville politics. From this Pelham passed to a treatment of starvation wages on the one hand, and prodigal salaries, surpluses and dividends on the other. He featured that the strike was for the enforcement of existing laws, and that the companies refused any arbitration. The conclusion recommended that the state enforce arbitration, or, if the companies could not be controlled, that the profiteering be ended by the state's taking over the mines and running them.