"I suppose you understand," he said, "that there'll be no more work for you."
"Yes," I answered, "I understand," and we
exchanged a glance that meant we both agreed it was Frances' fault.
In the shop below I found Mr. F. and returned the fifty cents he had advanced me. He seemed surprised at this.
"I'm sorry," he said, in his gentle voice, "that we couldn't arrange things."
"I'm sorry, too," I said. But I dared not add a word against Frances. She had terrorized me like the rest, and though I knew I never would see her again, her pale, lifeless mask haunted me. I remembered a remark the German woman had made when Frances dismissed the Polish girl: "People ought to make it easy, and not hard, for others to earn a living."
At the end of this somewhat agitating day I returned to my tenement lodgings as to a haven of rest. There was one other lodger besides myself: she was studying music on borrowed money at four dollars a lesson. Obviously she was a victim to luxury in the same degree as the young women with whom I had lunched at the bakery. Nothing that a rich society girl might have had been left out of her wardrobe, and borrowed money seemed as good as any for making a splurge.
Miss Arnold was something of a snob, intellectual and otherwise. It was evident from my wretched clothes and poor grammar that I was not accustomed to ladies of her type, but, far from
sparing me, she humiliated me with all sorts of questions.
"I'm tired of taffeta jackets, aren't you?" she would ask, apropos of my flimsy ulster. "I had taffeta last year, with velvet and satin this winter; but I don't know what I'll get yet this summer."