But social life was beginning to wear on Miss Ida’s intended.  He took up his hat and swung along toward the door.  I was struggling to extract with my fork the bones of a hard, fried fish.  Mrs. Wood encouraged me in a motherly tone: 

“Oh, my, don’t be so formal; take your knife.”

“Say,” called a voice from the door, “say, come on, Ida, I’m waiting for you.”  And the blonde fiancee hurried away with an embarrassed laugh to join her lover.  She was refined and delicate, her ears were small, her hands white and slender, she spoke correctly with a nasal voice, and her teeth (as is not often the case among this class, whose lownesses seem suddenly revealed when they open their mouths) were sound and clean.

The man’s smooth face was all commonness and vulgarity.

“He’s had appendicitis,” Mrs. Wood explained when we were alone.  “He’s been out of work a long time.  As soon as he goes to his job his side bursts out again where they operated on him.  He ain’t a bit strong.”

“When are they going to be married?” I asked.

“Oh, dear me, they don’t think of that yet; they’re in no hurry.”

“Will Miss Ida work after she’s married?”

“No, indeed.”

Did they not have their share of ideal then, these two young labourers who could wait indefinitely, fed by hope, in their sordid, miserable surroundings?

I returned to my tenement room; its one window opened over a narrow alley flanked on its opposite side by a second tenement, through whose shutters I could look and see repeated layers of squalid lodgings.  The thermometer had climbed up into the eighties.  The wail of a newly born baby came from the room under mine.  The heat was stifling.  Outdoors in the false, flickering day of the arc lights the crowd swarmed, on the curb, on the sidewalk, on the house steps.  The breath of the black, sweet night reached them, fetid, heavy with the odour of death as it blew across the stockyards.  Shouts, calls, cries, moans, the sounds of old age and of infancy, of despair and of joy, mingled and became the anonymous murmur of a hot, human multitude.

The following morning I put ten cents in my pocket and started out to get a job before this sum should be used up.  How huge the city seemed when I thought of the small space I could cover on foot, looking for work!  I walked toward the river, as the commercial activity expressed itself in that direction by fifteen-and twenty-story buildings and streams of velvet smoke.  Blocks and blocks of tenements, with the same dirty people wallowing around them, answered my searching eyes in blank response.  There was an occasional dingy sign offering board and lodging.  After I had made several futile inquiries at imposing offices on the river front I felt that it was a hopeless quest.  I should never get work unknown, unskilled, already tired and discouraged.  My collar was wilted in the fierce heat; my shabby felt sailor hat was no protection