“Well, anyway, you’re the first clerk I ever saw who had so much red blood that she could afford to use it for decorative purposes.  Step into the next room, answer the questions on this card and turn it in.  You’ll be notified.”

Ray Willets took the searching, telltale blank that put its questions so pertinently.  “Where last employed?” it demanded.  “Why did you leave?  Do you live at home?”

Ray Willets moved slowly away toward the door opposite.  The superintendent reached forward to press the button that would summon Applicant No. 180.  But before his finger touched it Ray Willets turned and came back swiftly.  She held the card out before his surprised eyes.

“I can’t fill this out.  If I do I won’t get the job.  I work over at the Halsted Street Bazaar.  You know—­the Cheap Store.  I lied and sent word I was sick so I could come over here this morning.  And they dock you for time off whether you’re sick or not.”

The superintendent drummed impatiently with his fingers.  “I can’t listen to all this.  Haven’t time.  Fill out your blank, and if—­”

All that latent dramatic force which is a heritage of her race came to the girl’s aid now.

“The blank!  How can I say on a blank that I’m leaving because I want to be where real people are?  What chance has a girl got over there on the West Side?  I’m different.  I don’t know why, but I am.  Look at my face!  Where should I get red cheeks from?  From not having enough to eat half the time and sleeping three in a bed?”

She snatched off her shabby glove and held one hand out before the man’s face.

“From where do I get such hands?  Not from selling hardware over at Twelfth and Halsted.  Look at it!  Say, couldn’t that hand sell silk and lace?”

Some one has said that to make fingers and wrists like those which Ray Willets held out for inspection it is necessary to have had at least five generations of ancestors who have sat with their hands folded in their laps.  Slender, tapering, sensitive hands they were, pink-tipped, temperamental.  Wistful hands they were, speaking hands, an inheritance, perhaps, from some dreamer ancestor within the old-world ghetto, some long-haired, velvet-eyed student of the Talmud dwelling within the pale with its squalor and noise, and dreaming of unseen things beyond the confining gates—­things rare and exquisite and fine.

“Ashamed of your folks?” snapped the superintendent.

“N-no—­No!  But I want to be different.  I am different!  Give me a chance, will you?  I’m straight.  And I’ll work.  And I can sell goods.  Try me.”

That all-pervading greyness seemed to have lifted from the man at the desk.  The brown flecks in the eyes seemed to spread and engulf the surrounding colourlessness.  His face, too, took on a glow that seemed to come from within.  It was like the lifting of a thick grey mist on a foggy morning, so that the sun shines bright and clear for a brief moment before the damp curtain rolls down again and effaces it.