Once she sat resting on a stoop beneath the sign of a woman’s-aid bureau.  She read it, but, somehow, her mind would not register.  The calves of her legs and the line where her shoe cut into her heel were hurting.

She supped in the family-entrance cafe again—­the bowl of veal stew and two glasses of beer.  Some days following, her very first venture out into the morning, she found employment—­a small printing-shop off Sixth Avenue just below Twenty-third Street.  A mere pocket in the wall, a machine champing in its plate-glass front.

  VISITING-CARDS WHILE YOU WAIT
  THIRTY-FIVE CENTS A HUNDRED

She entered.

“The sign says—­’girl wanted.’”

A face peered down at her from a high chair behind the champing machine.

“‘Goil wanted,’ is what it says.  Goil!”

“I—­I ain’t old,” she faltered.

“Cut cards?”

“I—­Try me.”

“Five a week.”

“Why—­yes.”

“Hang your coat and hat behind the sink.”

Before noon, a waste of miscut cards about her, she cut her hand slightly, fumbling at the machine, and cried out.

“For the love of Mike—­you want somebody to kiss it and make it well?  Here’s a quarter for your time.  With them butter-fingers, you better get a job greasin’ popcorn.”

Out in the sun-washed streets the wind had hauled a bit.  It cut as she bent into it.  With her additional quarter, she still had two dollars and twenty cents, and that afternoon, in lower Sixth Avenue, at the instance of another small card fluttering out in the wind, she applied as dishwasher in a lunch-room and again obtained—­this time at six dollars a week and suppers.

The Jefferson Market Lunch Room, thick with kicked-up sawdust and the fumes of hissing grease, was sunk slightly below the level of the sidewalk, a fitting retreat for the mole-like humanity that dined furtively at its counter.  Men with too short coat-sleeves and collars turned up; women with beery eyes and uneven skirt-hems dank with the bilge-water of life’s lower decks.

Lower Sixth Avenue is the abode of these shadows.  Where are they from, and whither going—­these women without beauty, who walk the streets without handkerchiefs, but blubbering with too much or too little drink?  What is the terrible riddle?  Why, even as they blubber, are there women whose bodies have the quality of cream, slipping in between scented sheets?

Ann ’Lisbeth, hers not to argue, but accept, dallied with no such question.  Behind the lunch-room, a sink of unwashed dishes rose to a mound.  She plunged her hands into tepid water that clung to her like fuzz.

“Ugh!”

“Go to it!” said the proprietor, who wore a black flap over one eye.  “Dey won’t bite.  If de grease won’t cut, souse ’em wit’ lye.  Don’t try to muzzle no breakage on me, neither, like the slut before you.  I kin hear a cup crack.”

“I won’t,” said Ann ’Lisbeth, a wave of the furry water slopping out and down her dress-front.