She was with another girl, and it was the other girl who had dropped her purse almost at Gunnar’s feet. He had picked it up, and had spoken to them arrogantly; but the more curt and scornful he was, the more did Mabel smile on him, she with her pearls and her gloves and her drawling voice. Ignoring her friend, she had walked close beside Gunnar.
“It’s a shame,” she had said, “for you to be just a sailor!”
That made him angry. He was studying navigation, he was going to take an examination and get his mate’s ticket, and some day he would be master of a ship.
“My father’s the superintendent of a factory,” she said. “I know he’ll give you a job.”
“I don’t want any more jobs,” declared Gunnar.
But, all the same, he went to her father the next day, and he did get a job, and after two months he was made foreman. Now he had a little car of his own, and two suits of clothes, and a fine watch. He was making good money, and he wanted more. He had never thought much about money until he met Mabel.
Sometimes she came to the factory to drive her father home, and always she stopped to talk to Gunnar. She didn’t care how much the men stared.
“Gunnar,” she said one day, “I want you to come to the house to dinner.”
“Not me!” said Gunnar.
But he went, and he could not forget it. In the factory, grimy, in his rough work clothes, he would remember how he had sat at table in their fine house that night, with the girl opposite him, in a glittering low-cut dress, and her mother and father making much of him. They wanted him for their girl—he knew that. They would help him along in the world, for her sake, and to his ruin—he knew that, too.