“Maybe mine will grow larger,” said Ellen.

“No, they won’t.  They’ll grow all bony and knotty, but they won’t grow any bigger.”

“Well, I shall have to get along with them the best way I can,” replied Ellen, rather impatiently.  This girl was irritating to a degree, and yet there was all the time that vague dejection about her, and withal a certain childishness, which seemed to insist upon patience.  The girl was really older than Ellen, but she was curiously unformed.  Some of the other girls said openly that she was “lacking.”

“You act stuck up.  Are you stuck up?” asked Mamie Brady, suddenly, after another pause.

Ellen laughed in spite of herself.  “No,” said she, “I am not.  I know of no reason that I have for being stuck up.”

“Well, I don’t know of any either,” said the other girl, “but I didn’t know.  You sort of acted as if you felt stuck up.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“You talk stuck up.  Why don’t you talk the way the rest of us do?  Why do you say ‘am not,’ and ‘ar’n’t’; why don’t you say ’ain’t’?”

The girl mimicked Ellen’s voice impishly.

Ellen colored.  “I am going to talk the way I think best, the way I have been taught is right, and if that makes you think I am stuck up, I can’t help it.”

“My, don’t get mad.  I didn’t mean anything,” said the other girl.

All the time while Ellen was working, and even while the exultation and enthusiasm of her first charge in the battle of labor was upon her, she had had, since her feminine instincts were, after all, strong with her, a sense that Robert Lloyd was under the same great factory roof, in the same human hive, that he might at any moment pass through the room.  That, however, she did not think very likely.  She fancied the Lloyds seldom went through the departments, which were in charge of foremen.  Mr. Norman Lloyd was at the mountains with his wife, she knew.  They left Robert in charge, and he would have enough to do in the office.  She looked at the grimy men working around her, and she thought of the elegant young fellow, and the utter incongruity of her being among them seemed so great as to preclude the possibility of it.  She had said to herself when she thought of obtaining work in Lloyd’s that she need not hesitate about it on account of Robert.  She had heard her father say that the elder Lloyd almost never came in contact with the men, that everything was done through the foremen.  She reasoned that it would be the same with the younger Lloyd.  But all at once the girl at her side gave her a violent nudge, which did not interrupt for a second her own flying fingers.

“Say,” she said, “ain’t he handsome?”

Ellen glanced over her shoulder and saw Robert Lloyd coming down between the lines of workmen.  Then she turned to her work, and her fingers slipped and bungled, her ears rang.  He passed without speaking.

Mamie Brady openly stared after him.  “He’s awful handsome, and an awful swell, but he’s awful stuck up, just like the old boss,” said she.  “He never notices any of us, and acts as if he was afraid we’d poison him.  My, what’s the matter with you?”