She paused for breath—a host of memories overpowering her. “I can’t give it out in words,” she went on. “But just as there ain’t no bottom to being poor, there ain’t no bottom to being lonely. Before, everything I done was alone, by myself. My heart hurt so with hunger for people. But here, in the factory, I feel I’m with everybody together. Just the sight of people lifts me on wings in the air.”
Opening her bag of lunch which had lain unheeded in her lap, she turned to him with a queer, little laugh, “I don’t know why I’m so talking myself out to you—”
“Only talk more. I want to know everything about yourself.” An aching tenderness rushed out of his heart to her, and in his grave simplicity he told her how he had overheard one of the girls say that she, Shenah Pessah, looked like a “greeneh yenteh,” just landed from the ship, so that he cried out, “Gottuniu! If only the doves from the sky were as beautiful!”
They looked at each other solemnly—the girl’s lips parted, her eyes wide and serious.
“That first day I came to the shop, the minute I gave a look on you, I felt right away, here’s somebody from home. I used to tremble so to talk to a man, but you—you—I could talk myself out to you like thinking in myself.”
“You’re all soft silk and fine velvet,” he breathed reverently. “In this hard world, how could such fineness be?”
An embarrassed silence fell between them as she knotted and unknotted her colored kerchief.
“I’ll take you home? Yes?” he found voice at last.
Under lowered lashes she smiled her consent.
“I’ll wait for you downstairs, closing time.” And he was gone.