"Well, they're all wrong. I'm not."
"And aren't you in love with him?"
"Not a bit. You Little Foolish, can't people be good friends without being in love?"
Yetta went to sleep trying to think out this proposition. She hardly remembered the choice she had made between college and work, nor the strain of the great meeting. It was very hard to believe that Mabel and Walter were not in love.
CHAPTER XVII THE OPERATING ROOM
Walter's study seemed to Yetta an ideal room. There was no appearance of luxury about it—nothing to remind one by contrast of the hungry people outside. There were no "decorations," except two portraits of his grandparents and a small reproduction of one of the great cow-faced gods of the Haktites which stood on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. The rest of the room was made up of comfortable chairs, a well-padded window-seat, and books. The cases were full and so was the table and so were some of the chairs and there were books on the floor. Knowledge was a goal which her father had set before Yetta as almost synonymous with "goodness" and "happiness." It was a thing she had forgotten about in the sweat-shop, but for which her recent experience had given her an all-consuming hunger. No one who has been "sent to college," who has had an education thrust upon him, can realize how much she venerated books. When Longman brought her to his room, it seemed to her as if she had entered the home of her dreams.
The greatest thing that had come to Yetta in the new life was the gift of friends. In the days since her father's death, with the exception of the few weeks when Rachel had given her confidences, she had had only loveless relatives and shopmates. And now she could hardly count her friends. From the very first she had given Longman the niche of honor in this gallery. The reason was something more subtle than his dramatic entrance into her life. She seldom thought of him as her rescuer. But she felt that his regard for her was more personal and direct than that of the others. She could not have explained it coherently to herself, but she felt it no less keenly. Mrs. Van Cleave was fond of her because she had eyes like those of the long-dead daughter. Mrs. Karner was attracted to her because she typified her own lost youth. Isadore Braun and Mabel valued her because of her flaming spirit of revolt.
Over on "the Island," the warden's little three-year-old son, in spite of her prison dress, in spite of the jealousy of his own nurse, had run into her arms at first sight. Instinctively she felt that Walter liked her in a similar fashion. If, during the strike, she had sold out, turned "scab," Braun and Mabel would no longer have been her friends. But Longman would have come to her in his gentle, lumbering way and asked her about it. He might have been disappointed, even angry, but still he would have been her friend.