“What’s the matter with you?”

“Heart disease for one thing, and then I’m so nervous.  It’s kind of hard to have to work when you’re not able.  To-day I can hardly stand, my head’s aching so.  They make the poor work for just as little as they can, don’t they?  It’s not the work I mind, but if I can’t give in my seven a week at home I get to worrying.”

Now and then as she talked in her inarticulate pitiful voice the tears added luster to her eyes as her emotions welled up within her.

The machines began to roar and vibrate again.  The noon recess was over.  She went back to her job.  Her broad, heavy hands began once more to serve a company on whose moderate remuneration she depended for her daily bread.  Her silhouette against the window where she stood was no longer an object for my vain eyes to look upon with a sense of superiority.  I could hear the melancholy intonation of her voice, pronouncing words of courage over her disfigured underlip.  She was one of nature’s failures—­one of God’s triumphs.

Saturday night my fellow lodger, Miss Arnold, and I made an expedition to the spring opening of a large dry-goods shop in the neighbourhood of Mrs. Brown’s.  I felt rather humble in my toil-worn clothes to accompany the young woman, who had an appearance of prosperity which borrowed money alone can give.  But she encouraged me, and we started together for the principal street of the quarter whose history was told in its show-case windows.  Pawnshops and undertakers, bakeries and soda-water fountains were ranged side by side on this highway, as the necessity for them is ranged with incongruous proximity in the existence of those who live pell-mell in moral and material disorder after the manner of the poor.  There was even a wedding coach in the back of the corner undertaker’s establishment, and in the front window a coffin, small and white, as though death itself were more attractive in the young, as though the little people of the quarter were nearer Heaven and more suggestive of angels than their life-worn elders.  The spotless tiny coffin with its fringe and satin tufting had its share of the ideal, mysterious, unused and costly; in the same store with the wedding coach, it suggested festivity:  a reunion to celebrate with tears a small pilgrim’s right to sleep at last undisturbed.

The silver rays of the street lamps mingled with the yellow light of the shop windows, and on the sidewalk there was a cosmopolitan public.  Groups of Italian women crooned to each other in their soft voices over the bargains for babies displayed at the spring opening; factory girls compared notes, chattered, calculated, tried to resist, and ended by an extravagant choice; the German women looked and priced and bought nothing; the Hungarians had evidently spent their money on arriving.  From the store window wax figures of the ideal woman, clad in latest Parisian garb, with golden hair and blue eyes, gazed down benignly into the faces uplifted with envy and admiration.  Did she not plainly say to them “For $17 you can look as I do”?