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The section of Broadway to which Amy piloted Jean, showing her all the short cuts which would save precious time at lunch hour, seemed wholly given over to wholesale establishments with signs bearing Hebrew names.
"Yes; this is Main Street of the New Jerusalem, all right," she assented to Jean's comment; "but you'll find there are Jews and Jews in the clothing trade. I'd hate to work for some of the chosen people I've seen, but you'd have to hunt a long time to find a more well-meaning man than old Mr. Meyer. I only hope he'll be down this morning."
Other workers, chiefly women and girls, crowded into the rough freight elevator by which they ascended, and one or two who got off with them at Meyer & Schwarzschild's loft greeted Amy by name. They inventoried her finery minutely, Jean saw, and nudging one another, arched significant brows when her back was turned. On her part, Amy took little notice of them, and, without introducing Jean, swept by toward the flimsy partition of wood and ground glass which shut the workrooms from the counting-room, brushed aside an office boy, who demanded her business, and knocked at a half-open door lettered, "Jacob Meyer, Sr."
The head of the firm, who bade them enter, was a very old man with a patriarchal beard. He smiled benignantly, recognized Amy after a moment's hesitation, asked about her new position, and patted her on the shoulder when she told him he must be as good to Miss Fanshaw as he had been to her. Turning to Jean, he said that Miss Archer had never sent them a poor worker.
"I have the highest opinion of Miss Archer," he added, with the air of a presiding officer who relished the taste of his own periods. "Her charity knows neither Jew nor Gentile. I met her first here in New York when some of us were trying a philanthropic experiment in the so-called Ghetto. It presented grave difficulties, very grave difficulties, and it is hardly too much to say,—in fact, I have no hesitation in saying,—that Miss Archer saved the day. I recall one most signal instance of her tact—"
He would have rambled on willingly, but Amy cut in with the statement that she must be off, squeezed Jean's hand encouragingly, and whisked out forthwith. Her abrupt exit seemed to disorder the deliberate clockwork of old Mr. Meyer's thoughts, for he sat some little time staring at a letter-file with his mouth ajar, till, recollecting himself at last, he brought forth, "As I was saying, my dear, I trust you'll like our ways,"—which Jean was certain he had not said at all,—and thereupon led her to the door of one of the workrooms and turned her over to its forewoman, a stout Jewess with oily black hair combed low to disguise her too prominent ears.
Work had begun, and the place was deafening with the whir of some thirty-odd close-ranked machines which, their ends almost touching, filled all the floor save the narrowest of aisles, where stood the chairs of the operators. To one of these sewing-machines and a huge pile of unstitched sleeves Jean was assigned. The task itself was simple, after the sound training of the refuge school, but the conditions under which she worked told heavily against her efficiency. The din was incessant, the light poor, the low-ceiled room crowded beyond its air-space, and the floor none too clean. As the morning drew on, the atmosphere became steadily worse. Now and then the forewoman would open a window,—she stood mainly by a door herself, turning and turning a showy ring upon her fat index finger,—but the relatively purer air thus admitted reached only the girls who worked nearest, of whom Jean was not one, and these soon shivered and complained of drafts.
By the time the hands of a dingy clock marked ten, her head was throbbing violently and her spine seemed one prolonged ache. Her neighbors, except a thin-cheeked woman who stopped now and again to cough, turned off their stints with the regularity of long habit, straightening only to seize fresh supplies for their insatiable machines. At twelve o'clock, when whistles blew from all quarters and the other employees, dropping work as it stood, scrambled for lunch-boxes or wraps, Jean relaxed in her chair, too jaded to rise. Food was out of the question,—even the look of the pickle-scented luncheons which some of the cloak-makers opened made her ill,—but she presently dragged herself outdoors, and striking down a cross street, at whose farther end she could see trees, came to a little park distinguished by a marble arch, where she wandered aimlessly till she judged it time to return.
The streets she retraced were now thronged with masculine wage-earners lounging and smoking in the doorways of their various places of employment. All paid her the tribute of a stare, and some made audible comments on her hair or eyes, or what they termed her shape. Her own doorway was also crowded. These idlers were, for the most part, girls from the many garment-manufactories of one sort and another which the great building housed; but a man stood here and there, either the leader or the butt of some horse-play. One of the young women who had scrutinized Amy in the elevator nodded to her and seemed about to speak, but Jean felt too heart-sick for words, and returned at once to her appointed corner in the hive, where, although it still lacked something of one o'clock, she again sat down to her machine. The air was better, for the windows had been thrown open during the noon-hour, but the room was in consequence very chill, and her fellow-workers, now drifting back in twos and threes, grumbled as they came. Among them was the girl who had greeted her below, and looking at her with more interest Jean read kindness in her freckled face. Their eyes met again, with a half-smile, and the girl edged down the narrow lane for a moment's gossip.