If it were true, and if he knew it.
She moved about the kitchen, making up the fire, working
automatically in that methodless way that always set Ellen's teeth
on edge, and thinking. But subconsciously she was listening, too.
She had heard Dan go into his mother's room and close the door.
She was bracing herself against his coming down.
Dan was difficult those days, irritable and exacting. Moody, too,
and much away from home. He hated idleness at its best, and the
strike was idleness at its worst. Behind the movement toward the
general strike, too, he felt there was some hidden and sinister
influence at work, an influence that was determined to turn what
had commenced as a labor movement into a class uprising.
That very afternoon, for the first time, he had heard whispered the
phrase: "when the town goes dark." There was a diabolical
suggestion in it that sent him home with his fists clenched.
He did not go to his mother's room at once. Instead, he drew a
chair to his window and sat there staring out on the little street.
When the town went dark, what about all the little streets like
this one?
After an hour or so of ominous quiet Edith heard him go into his
mother's room.
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