“That’s nice,” said Carlisle, to the factory-girl.  “Then the presents come as a surprise to him.”

“Surprise—­no, ma’am.  He don’t never know.  Take the tags off ’n ’em, and slip ’em in his drawer, and he’ll put ’em on and never notice nor suspicion, shirts and such.  It’s like he thought raiment was brought him by the crows,—­like in the Bible, ma’am, y’ know?”

There was a brief silence.  Carlisle’s sheltered life had not too often touched the simple annals of the poor.  She seemed to get a picture....

The little work-girl’s face was not coarse, strangely enough, or even common-looking; it was pleasing in an odd, elfin way.  Her white dress and black jacket were in good taste for her station, without vulgarity.  Such details Carlisle’s feminine eye soon gathered in.  The touch she missed was that that cheap dress was an exact copy of one she herself had worn one Sunday afternoon in May, as near as Kern Garland could remember it.

“How long were you at the Works?” said the lady suddenly.

“At the Works?  More’n three years, ma’am.”

There was another silence amid the bustle of the people’s emporium.

“Tell me,” said Carlisle, with some effort, “do you—­did you—­looking at it from a worker’s point of view—­find it such a very bad place to work?”

“Oh, no, ma’am!” said Kern.  “Bad—­oh, no!  It’s—­it’s fine!”

Carlisle’s gaze became wider than the little girl’s own.  “But—­Mr. V.V. says it’s a terrible place....”

“It’s only the beautiful way he talks,” said Kern, eagerly.  “I mean, he’s so, so sorry for the poor....  But lor, ma’am, we know how rich is rich, and poor poor, and so it must always be this side o’ the pearly gates—­”

She stopped short; and then added shyly, with a kind of anxiousness in her wide dark gaze:  “An expression, ma’am—­for Heaven.  I—­I just learned it.”

The lady’s look was absent.  “Oh!...  Where did you learn that?”

“Off Sadie Whirtle, ma’am—­a friend of mine.”  The girl hesitated, and then said:  “That’s her now.”

And she pointed a small finger at the enormous snapping Saleslady, who stood glowering and patting her transformation at another customer ten feet away.

But Carlisle did not follow the finger, and so missed the sight of Miss Whirtle.  Her rising relief had been penetrated by a doubt, not a new one ...  Would her friend Vivian have committed himself to the articles for only a foolish sentimentalism which the poor themselves repudiated?...

“But tell me frankly, Corinne, for I want to know,” said she—­“I know working must be hard in any case—­but do the girls at the Works consider it a—­a reasonably nice place?”

Kern knew nothing of the articles, of any situation:  and at that Co-rinne, her heart ran to water within her.  She would have said anything for that.

“Oh, ma’am, all say it’s the nicest place to work in town.  Yes, ma’am ...  And some of ’em has rich fathers and needn’t work at all anywhere, but they just go on and work at the Works, yes, ma’am, because they druther ...”