"All right, go to that table," she answered. And at a long oak table, one of a dozen women and girls, Ethel folded envelopes and addressed them for about three hours. Down at the end, two girl companions chatted and laughed at their labour. But the rest were just busy. "Hand me those envelopes, if you please." And so it was all through the room. She came back the next morning and the next; and as she worked, her expression was grim. "It isn't their fault," she decided. "They want the vote, they don't want me."
And she turned forlornly back to the work of moving up to her new apartment.
The first of May was drawing near, and she saw signs of restlessness, as thousands of New Yorkers prepared to change their quarters. Moving, always moving. Did they never stop in one place and make it a home? The big building in which Ethel lived took on an impersonal air, as though saying, "What do I care? I'm all concrete, with good hard steel inside of that." What a queer place for people's homes! People moving in and out! Curiously she probed into its life. She had long ago made friends with the wife of the superintendent, and through her Ethel collected bits about these many families so close together and yet so apart; all troubles kept strictly out of sight, with the freight elevator for funerals, cool looks and never a word of greeting. "Keep off," writ clear on every face.
"It isn't real, this living! It can't last!" she exclaimed to herself. "They'll have to work out something better than this—something, oh, much homier!" She thought of the old frame house in Ohio. "That's gone," she declared, with a swallow.
Her acquaintance with young Mrs. Grewe was still the one bright spot at such times. When Ethel felt blue she would go upstairs to the sunny new home that was to be hers; and there the blithe welcome she received restored her own belief in herself. Mrs. Grewe would often lead her to talk of her home in Ohio, the eager dreams and plans of her girlhood; and on her side, the young widow gave pictures of life in London and Paris as she had seen it so many times. They still shopped together occasionally.
But one afternoon about six o'clock, as Ethel's car drew up at the door and she and her one friend got out, Joe came along—and with one quick angry look he hurried into the building. Quite furious and ashamed for him, Ethel turned to her companion—but Mrs. Grewe smiled queerly and held out her small gloved hand.
"Good-bye, my dear, it has been so nice—this afternoon and all the others." Her tone was a curious mixture of amused defiance and real regret. Ethel stammered something, but in a moment her friend was gone.
Upstairs she met Joe with an angry frown, but to her indignant reproaches he replied by a quizzical smile.
"Look here, Ethel." He took her arm, in a kind protecting sort of way which made her fairly boil. "Look here. I can't let you go about with a shady little person like that. I didn't know you'd picked her up. Now, now—I understand, of course—you met her up there in the new apartment. What a fool I was not to have thought of it."
"Thought of what? For goodness sake!"