An intolerant colored boy, pompous in green-and-gilt livery eyed her insolently. She stated her errand.
"The help's entrance is on the side street," he informed her impudently. "You turn right around and go right out where you just came in and go around to the side where I tells you and go in there and you tell Joe I sent you. If he hain't too busy maybe he'll run you up on the freight elevator, but if he is you can walk. It's apartment 41, fourth floor, front."
Ah, you should have seen Octavia's daughter, tired and little and dripping and frumpy, lift her chin and look through and through that impudent Senegambian! He confessed afterward she looked so like somebody's high-toned ghost that it had sent the shivers down his spine. And just when he was ready to hear the wrath that her eyes threatened she turned abruptly and walked away so regally that he found himself muttering,
"I didn't notice she was such a high-stepping lady—"
The service entrance and Joe and the freight elevator conquered, she found herself face to face with new insolence, this time from a frowsy maid who led her grudgingly into the living-room that stretched across the front of the apartment. From ornate curtains a plump and fretful woman emerged,
"You're fifteen minutes late—she said she'd send some one at eight o'clock—but come along, sew in the children's bedroom—"
Felice followed through the whole untidy apartment into the narrow cluttered room. It appeared that the children were not yet dressed nor had their beds been put in order and they sat, two weedy pallid- looking mites, in the midst of a tremendous heap of broken toys and fought desperately for the possession of an eyeless, hairless carcass of a doll. A sewing machine piled high with garments was in front of the one broad window that opened on the gloomy whiteness of the court. An overturned basket, from which oozed tangled spools and myriads of buttons, lay on the floor in front of the machine. A stiff-backed gilt chair stood beside it.
"I cut out some pinafores yesterday," continued the fretful voice, "I wish you would run up the seams of those on the machine—french-seam them, please—and if I get time I'll show you how I want the collars— "
Felicia stood, absurdly little beside her plump employer, and spoke the first words she'd been given opportunity to utter,
"Good morning, Madame," she said in her clear contralto, "I think you do not understand. The Exchange should have told you that I am a needle-woman—that I do only hand work—I do not understand sewing machines—"