Studying faces, she thought many of the women and girls she chanced to meet, smiled with serenity as though forever cherished and watched over by those they loved.

The air in the collar and cuff establishment strangled her.  She knew she was gradually and surely shrivelling in the hot, stuffy room.  The begrimed windows rattled incessantly from the passing of elevated trains.  The place was filled with a whirl of noises and odors.

She wondered as she regarded some of the grizzled women in the room, mere mechanical contrivances sewing seams and grinding out, with heads bended over their work, tales of imagined or real girlhood happiness, past drunks, the baby at home, and unpaid wages.  She speculated how long her youth would endure.  She began to see the bloom upon her cheeks as valuable.

She imagined herself, in an exasperating future, as a scrawny woman with an eternal grievance.  Too, she thought Pete to be a very fastidious person concerning the appearance of women.

She felt she would love to see somebody entangle their fingers in the oily beard of the fat foreigner who owned the establishment.  He was a detestable creature.  He wore white socks with low shoes.  When he tired of this amusement he would go to the mummies and moralize over them.

Usually he submitted with silent dignity to all which he had to go through, but, at times, he was goaded into comment.

“What deh hell,” he demanded once.  “Look at all dese little jugs!  Hundred jugs in a row!  Ten rows in a case an’ ’bout a t’ousand cases!  What deh blazes use is dem?”

Evenings during the week he took her to see plays in which the brain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her guardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with the beautiful sentiments.  The latter spent most of his time out at soak in pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver, rescuing aged strangers from villains.

Maggie lost herself in sympathy with the wanderers swooning in snow storms beneath happy-hued church windows.  And a choir within singing “Joy to the World.”  To Maggie and the rest of the audience this was transcendental realism.  Joy always within, and they, like the actor, inevitably without.  Viewing it, they hugged themselves in ecstatic pity of their imagined or real condition.

The girl thought the arrogance and granite-heartedness of the magnate of the play was very accurately drawn.  She echoed the maledictions that the occupants of the gallery showered on this individual when his lines compelled him to expose his extreme selfishness.

Shady persons in the audience revolted from the pictured villainy of the drama.  With untiring zeal they hissed vice and applauded virtue.  Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere admiration for virtue.

The loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the unfortunate and the oppressed.  They encouraged the struggling hero with cries, and jeered the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers.  When anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery mourned.  They sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin.