Ellen colored. “I am going to talk the way I think best, the way I have been taught is right, and if that makes you think I am stuck up, I can't help it.”
“My, don't get mad. I didn't mean anything,” said the other girl.
All the time while Ellen was working, and even while the exultation and enthusiasm of her first charge in the battle of labor was upon her, she had had, since her feminine instincts were, after all, strong with her, a sense that Robert Lloyd was under the same great factory roof, in the same human hive, that he might at any moment pass through the room. That, however, she did not think very likely. She fancied the Lloyds seldom went through the departments, which were in charge of foremen. Mr. Norman Lloyd was at the mountains with his wife, she knew. They left Robert in charge, and he would have enough to do in the office. She looked at the grimy men working around her, and she thought of the elegant young fellow, and the utter incongruity of her being among them seemed so great as to preclude the possibility of it. She had said to herself when she thought of obtaining work in Lloyd's that she need not hesitate about it on account of Robert. She had heard her father say that the elder Lloyd almost never came in contact with the men, that everything was done through the foremen. She reasoned that it would be the same with the younger Lloyd. But all at once the girl at her side gave her a violent nudge, which did not interrupt for a second her own flying fingers.
“Say,” she said, “ain't he handsome?”
Ellen glanced over her shoulder and saw Robert Lloyd coming down between the lines of workmen. Then she turned to her work, and her fingers slipped and bungled, her ears rang. He passed without speaking.
Mamie Brady openly stared after him. “He's awful handsome, and an awful swell, but he's awful stuck up, just like the old boss,” said she. “He never notices any of us, and acts as if he was afraid we'd poison him. My, what's the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” said Ellen.
“You look white as a sheet; ain't you well?”
Ellen turned upon her with sudden fury. She had something of the blood of the violent Louds and of her hot-tempered grandmother. She had stood everything from this petty, insistent tormentor.
“Yes, I am well,” she replied, “and I will thank you to let me alone, and let me do my work, and do your own.”