“There's a woman on Joy Street does it,” said she. “She lives just opposite the school-house, and she does it awful cheap, only three cents a yard.” She thrust the handkerchief into her pocket.
“You haven't got it half off,” said Abby.
“Let it stay there, then,” said the girl, indifferently. “If you work pasting linings in a shoe-shop you've got to get pasted yourself.”
Ellen looked at the girl with a curious reflection that she spoke the truth, that she really was pasted herself, that the soil and the grind of her labor were wearing on her soul. She had seen this girl out of the shop—in fact, only the day before—and no one would have known her for the same person. When her light hair was curled, and she was prettily dressed, she was quite a beauty. In the shop she was a slattern, and seemed to go down under the wheels of her toil.
“On Joy Street, you said?” said Sadie Peel.
“Yes. Right opposite the school-house. Her name is Brackett.”
Then the one-o'clock whistle blew, and everybody, Ellen with the rest, went back to their stations. Robert Lloyd did not come into the room again that afternoon. Ellen worked on steadily, and gained swiftness. Every now and then the foreman came and spoke encouragingly to her.
“Look out, Mamie,” he said to the girl at her side, “or she'll get ahead of you.”
“I don't want to get ahead of her,” said Ellen, unexpectedly.
Flynn laughed. “If you don't, you ain't much like the other girls in this shop,” said he, passing on with his urbane, slightly important swing of shoulders.