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accepted the stretch-in for higher pay, within a few years they saw their pay back to where it was, and them having twice the machines to run.”
    “Competition, Mr. Kleist, competition,” Dearholt smilinglyresponded. “The costs in Paterson must be equal to those in the mills of New England and Pennsylvania, or there will be no jobs for anyone. It’s the owners who must cope with the costs and try to keep Paterson industry competitive. The generals look after the soldiers, that’s the way it must be, or the battle is lost.”
    “And now at Doherty’s, where I used to work,” Kleist went on, “they doubled the looms again, four to a man now, two in front of him and two behind. We wanted to strike but Doherty had bought out the union, the AFL; it ordered us back to work, saying they had worked out an agreement we’d be paid more. Paid more until it suited the bosses to bring wages back down to where they were, with twice the broad silk being produced!”
    “Aye, but they’re such beautiful machines now,” McDermott said, leaning his long head forward and his voice softening with tenderness. He had jutting half-white eyebrows and a chin with a dimple in the center like a scar healed. “They almost run themselves; the men in charge can go to sleep on their feet.”
    How strange faces are, Clarence thought. If we were turned upside down, would our underparts do as well for identification—to express our identities, our souls? We would still congregate, still converse, with visages once thought obscene.
    It was time for someone else to speak, but no one expected it to be Mrs. Caravello. “My husband,” she exclaimed. “Work with wet feet all day, all day! Come home so tired fall asleep in chair. Work kill him—kill him as if with gun!” And with an amusing vulgarism she held a plump hand in the air with a finger pointed like the barrel of a revolver.
    “Mamma
,” the older of the two girls reproached her, adding softly, blushing, “
Silenzio è sorte nostra
.”
    Nothing cowed Dearholt. His smile broadened, to expose back teeth as perfect and porcelain as those in front. “Work is the way of the country, my good lady. Those afraid of work should have stayed home, in the old country, where the competition is less open, less honest and strenuous, and everyone is taken care of, deserving or not, the village idiot right along with the man of initiative. All dressed up, and nowhere to go, that’s present-day Europe for you. Those who don’t like it here are welcome to go back. Anybody in my plant I hear expressing anarchist ideas, out they go, Jew or Italian or whatever. No free rides, Mrs.”—her name escaped him—“that’s the way we do things here. I hear talk about worker ownership of the mills—we have it already!
I
was a worker, a bobbin boy, as I may have said. Catholina Lambert himself, head of Dexter, Lambert, began as a humble worker, back in Yorkshire. Doherty, Bamford, John Ryle himself, who got silk started here—all came from Macclesfield, back in the English mills.”
    McDermott, at Mrs. Caravello’s side, confided the friendly fact, “Catholina Lambert built the Castle. Wonderful masonry and woodwork, up in the Castle.”
    Dearholt kept at her, with his friendly fierce smile: “The English and Scots who got here faced a wilderness. They had to fight cannibalistic savages! Those of you who have come later are fortunate—Paterson holds no redmen, does it? We have cleared the way for you! Your children and grandchildren will thank us, my dear lady, even if you cannot find it presently in your heart to do so. Am I overstepping, Reverend? I mean everything I say kindly, to encourage
all
of my fellow Americans. Courage and faith, that’s all we need.
Faith
.” He made a fist and vibrated it. “There’s where the power to succeed comes from, in a land God has favored with such a wealth of opportunity.”
    Mrs. Caravello misunderstood the gesture as hostile. She protested, “Rich think