Directly they were seated in the car Eunice gave Maria a violent nudge with her sharp elbow.  “He’s on this car,” she whispered in her ear, with a long hiss which seemed to penetrate the girl’s brain.

Maria made an impatient movement.

“Don’t you think you ought to just step over and thank him?” whispered Eunice.  “I’ll hold your bundles.  He’s on the other side, a seat farther back.  He raised his hat to me.”

“Hush!  I can’t here.”

“Well, all right, but I thought it would look sort of polite,” said Eunice.  Then she subsided.  Once in a while she glanced back at George Ramsey, then uneasily at her niece, but she said nothing more.

The car was crowded.  Workmen smelling of leather clung to the straps.  One, in the aisle next Maria, who sat on the outside this time, leaned fairly against her.  He was a good-looking young fellow, but he had a heavy jaw.  He held an unlighted pipe in his mouth, and carried a two-story tin dinner-pail.  Maria kept shrinking closer to her aunt, but the young man pressed against her all the more heavily.  His eyes were fixed with seeming unconsciousness ahead, but a furtive smile lurked around his mouth.

George Ramsey was watching.  All at once he arose and quietly and unobtrusively came forward, insinuated himself with a gentle force between Maria and the workman, and spoke to her.  The workman muttered something under his breath, but moved aside.  He gave an ugly glance at George, who did not seem to see him at all.  Presently he sat down in George’s vacated seat beside another man, who said something to him with a coarse chuckle.  The man growled in response, and continued to scowl furtively at George, who stood talking to Maria.  He said something about the fineness of the day, and Maria responded rather gratefully.  She was conscious of an inward tumult which alarmed her, and made her defiant both at the young man and herself, but she could not help responding to the sense of protection which she got from his presence.  She had not been accustomed to anything like the rudeness of the young workman.  In New Jersey caste was more clearly defined.  Here it was not defined at all.  An employe in a shoe-factory had not the slightest conception that he was not the social equal of a school-teacher, and indeed in many cases he was.  There were by no means all like this one, whose mere masculine estate filled him with entire self-confidence where women were concerned.  In a sense his ignorance was pathetic.  He had honestly thought that the pretty, strange girl must like his close contact, and he felt aggrieved that this other young man, who did not smell of leather and carried no dinner-pail, had ousted him.  He viewed Maria’s delicate profile with a sort of angry tenderness.

“Say, she’s a beaut, ain’t she?” whispered the man beside him, with a malicious grin, and again got a surly growl in response.

Maria finally, much to her aunt’s delight, said to George that they had been shopping, and thanked him for the articles which his money had enabled them to buy.