She was able to muster a grateful smile; for she felt a rare kindness of heart under the familiar animalism to which good-looking, well-formed women who go about much unescorted soon grow accustomed. Also, experience had taught her that, as things go with girls of the working class, his treatment was courteous, considerate, chivalrous almost. With men in absolute control of all kinds of work, with women stimulating the sex appetite by openly or covertly using their charms as female to assist them in the cruel struggle for existence—what was to be expected?
Her way to the elevator took her along aisles lined with tables, hidden under masses of cloaks, jackets, dresses and materials for making them. They exuded the odors of the factory—faint yet pungent odors that brought up before her visions of huge, badly ventilated rooms, where women aged or ageing swiftly were toiling hour after hour monotonously—spending half of each day in buying the right to eat and sleep unhealthily. The odors—or, rather, the visions they evoked—made her sick at heart. For the moment she came from under the spell of her peculiar trait—her power to do without whimper or vain gesture of revolt the inevitable thing, whatever it was. She paused to steady herself, half leaning against a lofty up-piling of winter cloaks. A girl, young at first glance, not nearly so young thereafter, suddenly appeared before her—a girl whose hair had the sheen of burnished brass and whose soft smooth skin was of that frog-belly whiteness which suggests an inheritance of some bleaching and blistering disease. She had small regular features, eyes that at once suggested looseness, good-natured yet mercenary too. She was dressed in the sleek tight-fitting trying-on robe of the professional model, and her figure was superb in its firm luxuriousness.
"Sick?" asked the girl with real kindliness.
"No—only dizzy for the moment."
"I suppose you've had a hard day."
"It might have been easier," Susan replied, attempting a smile.
"It's no fun, looking for a job. But you've caught on?"
"Yes. He took me."
"I made a bet with myself that he would when I saw you go in."
The girl laughed agreeably. "He picked you for Gideon."
"What department is that?"