It is like the note of a wind instrument—an oboe adding its slow note to the boom of the kettle-drum, the clang of gold-colored cymbals, and the singing ecstasy of violins.
One such small voice Ann 'Lisbeth Connors added to the great threnody of industry. Department stores that turned from her services almost before they were offered. Offices gleaned from penny papers, miles of them, and hours of waiting on hard-bottom chairs in draughty waiting-rooms. Faces, pasty as her own, lined up alongside, greedy of the morsel about to fall.
When the pinch of poverty threatens men and wolves, they grow long-faced. In these first lean days, a week of them, Ann 'Lisbeth's face lengthened a bit, too, and with the fuzz of yellow bangs tucked well up under her not so decent black hat, crinkles came out about her eyes.
Nights she supped in a family-entrance café beneath her room—veal stew and a glass of beer.
She would sit over it, not unpleasantly muzzy. She slept of nights now, and not so rigidly.
Then followed a week of lesser department stores as she worked her way down-town, of offices tucked dingily behind lithograph and small-ware shops, and even an ostrich-feather loft, with a "Curlers Wanted" sign hung out.
In what school does the great army of industry earn its first experience? Who first employs the untaught hand? Upon Ann 'Lisbeth, untrained in any craft, it was as if the workaday world turned its back, nettled at a philistine.
Once she sat resting on a stoop beneath the sign of a woman's-aid bureau. She read it, but, somehow, her mind would not register. The calves of her legs and the line where her shoe cut into her heel were hurting.
She supped in the family-entrance café again—the bowl of veal stew and two glasses of beer. Some days following, her very first venture out into the morning, she found employment—a small printing-shop off Sixth Avenue just below Twenty-third Street. A mere pocket in the wall, a machine champing in its plate-glass front.