She felt herself, as it were, turning pale inside, but into her cheeks there sprang a cold color.
"You wished to see me?"
"Well, do put on your hat, V.V.," interjected Hen, matter of fact, but glancing round at Cally's voice. "You'll catch pneumonia...."
"Yes--thank you.... I'd like to enlist your help, if I could, Miss Heth. I've just come from the Works, you see," he hurried on with curious intensity--"where I went to try to right what seems to be a clear injustice. I wonder--do you remember the girl I happened to mention to you at my uncle's that night,--a buncher here at the Works?..."
His expression said that he was counting on her remembering. The girl in the car was looking him through and through. Hen Cooney disappeared from between them; the roar of traffic faded away.
"No, I don't remember," said Miss Heth, biting her lip a little.
"Oh!--the girl I wanted the matrons for? Well, it's no matter," the tall young man said, with a belying look of youthful disappointment. But he went on with undiminished eagerness: "She's one of the best operatives in the Works, I assure you--a really valuable employee because she can get more work out of a machine than any two inexperienced girls. She's had over two years' practice, you see. This morning she reported again for work after nearly a month's illness in bed: she's had pleurisy. Well, MacQueen--the superintendent--declines to give her her place back."
"Why, what a shabby trick!" cried Hen....
She looked as if she desired to say much more, but she saw that V.V.'s eyes were fixed on Cally, whose father owned MacQueen, and forbore.
Cally's breast rose and fell. She saw what was coming now.... How did he dare--he who had so maligned her personally, who had so maliciously thrown bricks at papa and the Works--how did he dare to turn and beg favors from the objects of his slanders? This was the supreme impertinence. Now she would say to him what would destroy him from her ways forever....