For some time while she was speaking her eyes had been fixed steadily upon Joe's only picture. It stood on the mantel, a big charcoal sketch of a crowd of immigrants just leaving Ellis Island. They were of all races. Uncouth, heavy, stolid, with that hungry hope in all their eyes for more of the good things of the earth, they seemed like some barbaric horde about to pour in over the land. With her eyes upon their faces in deep, quiet hatred this woman from the Middle West had told the story of her life.
"Well, Sally," said her husband, who had grown restive toward the end, "I guess that'll do. Let's go on home."
"I'm sure I'm ready," she quickly replied. Now that she had come out of herself she seemed angry at having told so much.
When they had left there was a silence, which Sue broke with a breath of impatience.
"What a frightful thing it must be for a man in this work," she exclaimed, "to have a wife like that! A woman so hard and narrow, so wrapped up in her own little life, with not a spark of sympathy for any of his big ideals!"
"I suppose it's the life that has done it," said Eleanore quietly, looking at Sue.
"I'd like to see some women," Sue retorted angrily, "who have been in that life for years and years, and _have_ sympathy, have _everything_, don't care for anything else in the world!" She turned suddenly to Joe. "You said there were hundreds, didn't you?"
Joe looked back at her a moment. There was a startled, groping, searching expression in his eyes.
"Are many of them married?" Eleanore inquired.
"When a woman who, as Sue has just said, throws herself into this heart and soul, marries a man who is in it, too, how much of their time can they spend together?"
"That depends on the kind of work," he said. Eleanore held his eyes with hers.
"In some cases, I suppose," she went on, "like yours, for example, where the man's work keeps him moving--if the woman's work wouldn't let her go with him they would have to be half their time apart."
"As Mrs. Marsh and her husband were at the time when her second baby was born."
"Aren't there a good many, too, who don't exactly marry--but marry just a little--one woman here, another there, and so on?"
"Yes," said Joe, "there are some who do that."