“What’s the most you ever made a week?” The girl who asked the question moved up for me to sit on the bench beside her, and, unwrapping a newspaper parcel, took from it a large cucumber pickle, a piece of cheese, a couple of biscuits, and half of a cocoanut pie, and laid them on a table in front of her.  “Help yourself.”  She pushed the paper serving as tray and cloth toward me.  “I ain’t had much appetite lately.  Hello, Mamie!  Come over here and sit on our bench.  What you got good for lunch?  My stomach’s turned back on pie.  I’d give ten cents for a cup of coffee.”

“Everywhere else but this old hothouse sells it for two cents a cup without, and three cents with.”  The girl called Mamie nodded to me and took her seat on the bench.  “I don’t like milk nohow, and I’d give the money glad for something hot in the middle of the day.  Don’t nothing do your insides as much good as something piping hot.  Say—­I saw Barker last night.”  Her voice lowered but little.  “He and I are going to see ‘Some Girl’ at the Bijou next week.  It’s all make-up—­his being sweet on Ceeley Bayne!  That knock-kneed, slew-footed, pop-eyed Gracie Jones got that off.  I’m going to get one them lace-and-chiffon waists at Plum’s for $2.98 if don’t nobody get sick and need medicine between now and Wednesday.  Seems like somebody’s always sick at our house.”

The question asked me had been forgotten, and, glad to escape the acknowledgment that I had never earned a dollar in my life, I got up on the plea that I must see a girl at the other end of the room, and walked across it.  As I went I scanned each face I saw.  Consciously or subconsciously I had been hoping for days that I would see a face which ever haunts me, a face I wanted to forget and could not forget.  Everywhere I go, in factories or mills or shops or homes; in the streets, and at my windows, I am always wondering if I shall see her.  She was very unhappy.  Who is she?  Why was Selwyn with her?  It is my last thought at night, my first in the morning.

Yesterday I was at the box-factory where Jimmy Gibbons works.  It is his last week there.  On the fifteenth he starts again to school.  Knowing the president of the company well, I asked that Jimmy should be my guide through the various departments, and permission was given.  I wish Jimmy were mine.

“Miss High-Spy ’ain’t got any love for on-lookers, and we’d better not stay in here long.”  Jimmy’s voice was cautious, but his eyes merry, and, glancing in the direction of the sour and snappy person watching each movement of each worker, I agreed with him that it was not well to linger.  The room was big and bare, its benches filled with white-faced workers, and the autocrat who presided over it seemed unconscious of its stifling, steamy heat and sickening smells of glue and paste.  Going out into the hall, Jimmy and I went to a window, opened it, and gave our lungs a bath.

“What does she do it for?  Is she crazy?”