they came to attend the funeral. One by one they passed by his coffin, men of his own walk in life, and looked down on his dead face. They were sober, sympathetic and silent as they looked. Some of them, who had known him well in his lifetime, were moved to tears. Not that he had been a leader among them, nor that he had been a favorite with them, nor that they had respected or cared more for him than they had for a hundred others who worked nine hours a day, smoked an ill-smelling pipe, drank a few glasses of beer of an evening, and in general lived a monotonous, unambitious, unintellectual life. So that whatever emotion they manifested beyond that ordinarily caused by the mere fact of death was due wholly to the injustice of which they believed he had been a victim, and to the unusual manner of his taking off.
Bradley's widow, sitting near the head of the coffin with veil thrown back, watched them as they came and went. Whether or not others in the gathering marked the significance of the outpouring, she, at least, did not fail to do so. She sensed the spirit of the crowd. She saw in it a complete justification of her attitude toward the social forces that had kept her submissive and submerged, toward the power of wealth that had overridden her, toward the courts that had failed to give her justice.
She was not overwhelmed by grief. Why should she be? Bradley had never been a man to be ardently loved by any woman, much less by a woman of her mental capacity and attainments. Why she had married him was still a mystery among those who knew her. With her education, her quality of mind, her exceptional beauty, she might have had in marriage the most promising man in her circle who worked in any capacity for wages; she might, indeed, have had one of still higher social and business grade. But she chose to marry John Bradley. The reasons that govern the matrimonial choice are often inscrutable, and women
