Opposite me sat a ghost of girlhood. A tall, slender creature, cheeks like paper, eyes sunken. She, too, had the smile of good-fellowship—coin freely passed from workwoman to workwoman.
This girl's job was filthy. She inked edges of the shoes with a brush dipped in a pot of thick black fluid. Pile after pile of piece-work was massed in front of her; pile by pile disappeared. She worked like lightning.
"Do you like your job?" I ventured. This seemed to be the open sesame to all conversations in the shops. She shrugged her narrow shoulders but made no direct reply. "I used to have what you're doing; it's awful. That glue made me sick. I was in bed. So when I came back I got this." She was separated from my glue-pot by a table's length only.
"But don't you smell it from here?"
"Not so bad; this here" (pointing to her black fluid) "smells stronger; it drownds it.
"I make my wages clear," she announced to me a few minutes later.
"How do you mean?"
"Why, at noon I wait in a restaurant; they give me my dinner afterward. I go back there and wait on the table at supper, too. My vittles don't cost me anything!"
So that is where your golden noon hour is spent, standing, running, waiting, serving in the ill-smelling restaurant I shall name later; and not your dinner hour alone, but the long day's fag end!
"I ain't from these parts," she continued, confidentially, "I'm down East. I used to run a machine, but it hurts my side."