But as the hours wore on, and the air became hotter and closer, and no enlivening conversation came to relieve the strain, her interest began to wane. By nine o'clock her hands were sore and stained, and her back ached. By a quarter past, the buttons were slipping through her fingers, and she could not see to thread her needle.
"You vill do better to-morrow night," said Mrs. Lavinski kindly, in her wheezing voice. "I tell Ikey you do verra good."
Mrs. Lavinski looked shriveled and old. She wore a glossy black wig and long ear-rings, and when she was not coughing, she smiled pleasantly over her work. Once Mr. Lavinski stopped pressing long enough to put a cushion at her back.
"My Leah is a saint," he said. "If effra'boddy was so good as her, the
Messiah would come."
Nance dreamed of buttons that night, and by the next evening her ambition to become a wage-earner had died completely.
But a family conclave at the supper table revealed such a crisis in the family finances that she decided to keep on at the Lavinskis' for another week. Uncle Jed was laid up with the rheumatism, and Mr. Snawdor's entire stock in trade had been put in a wheelbarrow and dumped into the street, and a strange sign already replaced his old one of "Bungs and Fawcetts."
Things seemed in such a bad way that Nance had about decided to lay the matter before Mrs. Purdy, when Dan brought the disconcerting news that Mrs. Purdy had taken her brother south for the rest of the winter, and that there would be no more visits to the little house in Butternut Lane.
So Nance, not knowing anything better to do, continued to sit night after night on her stool behind the hot stove, sewing on buttons. Thirty-six buttons meant four cents, four cents meant a loaf of bread—a stale loaf, that is.
"Your little fingers vill git ofer bein' sore," Mrs. Lavinski assured her. "I gif you alum water to put on 'em. Dat makes 'em hard."
They not only became hard; they became quick and accurate, and Nance got used to the heat and the smell, and she almost got used to the backache. It was sitting still and being silent that hurt her more than anything else. Mr. Lavinski did not encourage conversation,—it distracted the workers,—and Nance's exuberance, which at first found vent in all sorts of jokes and capers, soon died for lack of encouragement. She learned, instead, to use all her energy on buttons and, being denied verbal expression, she revolved many things in her small mind. The result of her thinking was summed up in her speech to her stepmother at the end of the first week.