Nothing offered but the tobacco factories, and Pansy went there, while her brother Willie found work as a cash boy in a dry-goods store on Broad Street. The three younger ones, being too small to work, were continued at school, while the mother took in sewing to help eke out the family income.
It was hard on them all, most especially on Pansy, who was so intelligent and refined, and who hated to leave school and toil at repulsive tasks among companions who were mostly uncongenial, for, although some of the girls were sweet and pretty as herself, others were coarse and rude, and sneered at her, calling her proud and ambitious, although they knew at heart that they were only jealous of the lovely face, so round and dimpled, with its big purplish-blue eyes, shaded by such a beautiful fringe of long black curling lashes.
They all envied her that fair face and those silky masses of wavy dark hair that made such a becoming frame for the transparent white skin, with its wild-rose tints and delicate tracery of blue veins.
But, pretty or ugly, it did not matter, the girl said to herself sometimes, with bitter discontent, as she looked at her fair reflection in the mirror. She was nothing but a factory girl, after all, and there were people who looked down on her for that act as if the very sound were the essence of vulgarity. To have been a shopgirl even, or a dressmaker, or milliner, would have been far more genteel, she said to herself.
This was the first time in three years that she had got away from the factory, and she would not have done so then if she had not been given a furlough from work because there was a temporary dullness in trade.
Then Uncle Robbins had come to Richmond from his country home on a little business, and, struck by her pale cheeks and air of languor, invited her to go home with him. Mother urged her to accept the invitation, declaring that she could get along without her, and Pansy went gladly away on her little summer holiday, which was now drawing to an end.
Her heart was full of this as she swung to and fro in the hammock beneath the trees, and listened to the wind rustling the leaves so musically, seeming to murmur over and over that name so dear to her heart:
“Norman Wylde!”
He was a summer boarder at her aunt’s, and he had been kind to her, not cool and supercilious like the others, who looked down upon her because she was a working girl.
Pansy thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen, and she was grateful to him for the courteous way in which he treated her, never seeming to realize any difference in the social position of herself and Miss Ives, the Richmond belle, who was here with her mother because the doctors had tabooed any gayety for the elderly lady this summer on account of a serious heart trouble.