“Well, I don’t wonder,” said the third girl, who was elderly and whose complexion was tanned and weather-beaten almost to the color of the leather upon which she worked.  Yet through this seamed and discolored face, with thin grayish hair drawn back tightly from the temples, one could discern, as through a transparent mask, a past prettiness and an exceeding gentleness and faithfulness.  “If my sister’s little Helen was to be lost I shouldn’t know whether my hat was on or not,” said she.  “I believe I should go raving mad.”

“You wouldn’t have to slave as you have done supportin’ it ever since your sister’s husband died,” said the pretty girl.  “Only look how Eva’s waist bags in the back and she ’ain’t got any belt on.  I wouldn’t come out lookin’ so.”

“I should die if I didn’t have something to work for.  That’s the difference between being a worker and a slave,” said the other girl, simply.  “Poor Eva!”

“Well, it was a pretty young one,” said the first girl.

“Looks to me as if Eva Loud’s skirt was comin’ off,” said the pretty girl.  She pressed close to Jim Tenny with a familiar air of proprietorship as she spoke, but the young man did not seem to heed her.  He was looking over his bench at the figure on the street below, and his heavy black eyebrows were scowling, and his mouth set.

Jim Tenny was handsome after a swarthy and grimy fashion, for the tint of the leather seemed to have become absorbed into his skin.  His black mustache bristled roughly, but his face was freer than usual from his black beard-stubble, because the day before had been Sunday and he had shaved.  His black right hand with its squat discolored nails grasped his cutting-knife with a hard clutch, his left held the piece of leather firmly in place, while he stared out with that angry and anxious scowl at Eva, who had paused on the street below, and was staring up at the windows, as if she meditated a wild search in the factory for the lost child.  There was a curious likeness between the two faces; people had been accustomed to say that Eva Loud and her gentleman looked more like brother and sister than a courting couple, and there was, moreover, a curious spirit of comradeship between the two.  It asserted itself now with the young man, in opposition to the more purely sexual attraction of the pretty girl who was leaning against him, and for whom he had deserted Eva.

After all, friendship and good comradeship are a steadier force than love, if not as overwhelming, and it may be that tortoise of the emotions which outruns the hare.

“Well, for my part, I think a good deal more of Eva Loud than if she had come out all frizzed and ruffled—­shows her heart is in the right place,” said the man who had spoken first.  He spoke with a guttural drawl, and kept on with his work, but there was a meaning in his words for the pretty girl, who had coquetted with him before taking up with Jim Tenny.