Jeff went and sat down. His wife had the right way of looking at things, and he couldn't very well complain about it. He had to hope her supervisors or foremen or whatever they called them there were paying attention to what they were doing. From what she'd said, it sounded as if they were.

When she came in with a full plate for him, he asked anxiously, "This color you're getting, it will go away if you stop doin' what you're doin', right?"

She nodded. "I've seen it happen with some of the other girls, the ones they had to move away from the powder. But this here, what I've got, it ain't hardly nothin'. And besides"-she cocked her head at a saucy angle and stuck out her hip-"ain't you got a yen for a high-yellow gal?"

He'd just taken his first mouthful, and almost choked on it. Men told smoking-car and after-supper stories about Negro women with a lot of white blood in them. They were supposed to provide some of the fanciest stock in the fanciest sporting houses all over the CSA. Jeff didn't know anything about fancy sporting houses, not from experience. Some of the stories about high-yellow women were pretty fancy all by themselves, though.

He tried to sound severe: "The way you do talk." He couldn't do it; he started laughing. So did Emily. He said, "Gal I got a yen for is you. An' if I say that after the day I put in, you better know it's the truth."

"I like that," Emily said. "I feel the same way about you." She'd always been a bold-talking woman. A lot of men, Pinkard supposed, wouldn't have liked that. He didn't understand why. As far as he was concerned, thinking about it and talking about it were almost as much fun as doing it.

After supper, he dried pots and dishes, as he'd been doing for a while. No sooner had he put the last plate back in the cupboard than Emily said, "You are the helpingest man. That's another reason I love you."

"Is that a fact?" He still didn't quite know himself how he felt about doing women's work. He never told anybody at the foundry he did it, for fear people would say he was henpecked. Emily usually didn't say much about it, either, maybe to keep him from worrying his own mind. Now that she had said it, he felt obliged to answer gruffly: "You know why I'm doin' this, don't you?"

"Why, dear, I haven't got the faintest idea." Her smile and her voice and the way she stood all conspired to make a liar out of her. "Why don't you tell me?"

Instead of telling her -or rather, instead of telling her with words-he picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. She squealed and beat at his shoulders, but she was laughing while she did it. Getting out of his own clothes was the work of a moment. Getting her out of hers required more complicated unbuttonings, unhookings, unlacings. His hands were big and clumsy, but he managed.

He scraped a match afire and lighted a kerosene lamp on the nightstand by the bed. The light it gave was ruddier than sunlight; by it, he could hardly tell Emily's skin had changed color. He didn't care. That wasn't why he'd lighted it. "You are one /zwe-lookin' woman," he told his wife. The words came thick from his throat.

"And what do you propose to do about that?" she asked. He reached out for her and showed her, again without words.

Afterwards, with her curled up, head on his shoulder, both of them drifting off toward sleep, he wondered if Fanny Cunningham had listened to the bedsprings creaking. He and Bedford had teased each other about that every now and again, heading off toward work of a morning. If Fanny heard it now, though, it had to remind her that her husband wasn't there. Pinkard hoped Bedford was all right. He hadn't heard anything different, but what did that prove? Not enough.

"Might be my turn next," he muttered; conscription had scooped more white men out of the Sloss works over the past couple of weeks.

"What's that, honey?" Emily asked drowsily. "You say somethin'?"

"No," he said, and she fell asleep. Eventually, he did, too.

Herman Bruck's face twisted in annoyance. "Why don't you want to go to the play with me tonight?" he asked in a low voice, doing his best not to draw the notice of anyone else at the Socialist Party office.

"I just don't, Herman," Flora Hamburger told him. "When I'm done with work, I'm tired. What I want to do is go home and rest, nothing else." That wasn't the entire reason, but it was polite and true, as far as it went.

Bruck, as usual, did not know how to take no for an answer. "But it's one of Gordin's best," he exclaimed. "It has the most powerful arguments against the war I've seen anywhere."

"I'm already against the war," she reminded him. "I don't need any fresh arguments to be against it. What educates the proletariat is liable to bore me."

"But it shows the effect of the war on the poor, on the working classes," he persisted. "You'll find things you can borrow and get use of here."

Flora exhaled. Bruck was drawn to her, and had trouble realizing she was not drawn to him in return. She'd done her best to avoid being rude; after all, whether she went out with him or not, they had to work together. Instead of sharply telling him to go away and stop bothering her, she answered, "I can see the effect on my own family, thank you very much. My sister married to a soldier, my brothers both turning into militarists and liable to go through conscription as soon as they get old enough… I was against this war before it was declared, remember."

"Do you have to keep throwing that in my face?" he said angrily. "Maybe you were even right. I don't know. But if the United States win this war and we're seen as opposing it, we won't win an election anywhere in the country for the next twenty years. People will vote for the Republicans before they vote for us."

"I don't know about that," Flora said. "I don't know about that at all. With so many dead, with so many maimed, even winning this war won't be enough to make anyone glad we fought it."

"Write that down!" Bruck exclaimed. "It's a good propaganda point, and I haven't seen it anywhere else." He swung from suitor to political animal like a weathervane in a shifting wind.

Flora preferred him as political animal. There his instincts were good, which she would not have said about him as a suitor. She did write down the idea. "We should let it come from someone who isn't operating out of New York City," she said. "The Roosevelt propaganda machine has made New York Socialists pariahs, as far as the rest of the country is concerned."

"That's not right," Bruck said. "It's not fair." He calmed down. "But it is real, no doubt about that. We'll manage. Roosevelt can't censor everything we do, no matter how much he wishes he could."

Figuring ways to do that kept Bruck happily occupied till quitting time. Indeed, Flora was able to slip out the door and down the stairs while he was still shouting into a telephone. When she could, she preferred to deal with annoying men peacefully and indirectly, rather than whipping out a hat pin. When peaceful, indirect means didn't work

"Speak softly and carry a sharp pin," she murmured, laughing at the way she'd twisted TR's slogan. But the laughter did not last long. Roosevelt's stick had not been big enough to knock over either the Confederacy or Canada at the first onslaught, which meant casualties by the tens, by the hundreds of thousands over chunks of land hardly large enough to serve as burying grounds for the dead.

Soldiers' Circle men still prowled through the Lower East Side, but fewer of them than in the days just after the Remembrance Day riots. They weren't so likely to break heads as they had been then, either. She'd even heard a story that one of them had put aside his truncheon after falling in love with a pretty Jewish girl. She didn't know whether it was a true story; no one seemed to have details. That people were telling it was interesting, though. True or not, they wanted to believe it.