"And in the meantime," he continued, "you let me know of some evening when you can come out to a quiet corner where we can have supper together, and where we won't be wasting the firm's time. Then we'll talk this whole thing over, and I'll see what I can do."
The eyes of neither wavered.
"Thank you, Mr. Porter," said Katie again.
With that she left him, but she went away with the knowledge that her game of hide-and-seek was almost ended. Just when it would end was beyond all guessing, but that it would end soon and that it would end in her defiance of her superiors and her prompt expulsion seemed altogether certain. She reflected that the small delay which she had gained would profit but lightly those in whose interests she had attempted to truckle and palliate, and, when, that night, she told her experience to Carrie, her words fell upon ears that read into them a portentous meaning.
The homely, brown-haired Lithuanian, whose cheeks were less round now than they had been, and whose hair that needed no covering in the summer, was still uncovered, went to her weary picket-duty in Waverley Place the next morning—the morning, as it happened, that preceded Hermann's little brush with Mirka—with a slow step and a heavy heart. She knew the futility of the work she was performing; she saw it even in the relaxed vigilance of the policemen on the corners and in the mocking grins of the girls and toughs at the gloomy factory-door. All day as, sometimes companioned and sometimes alone, she plodded her eventless round, the irony of the task bit into her soul. Something she must do, and soon. Already she was deep in Katie's debt, and Katie was near dismissal.
The early autumn twilight dropped among the grimy buildings. The evening tide of Broadway rose and roared into Waverley Place. A cold wind lashed the dust into little whirlpools, wound the girl's cheap lawn skirt tightly about her aching knees, and ate through that thin material to the tingling skin. There was no one with her now, and she felt more than ever alone.
From the shadow of a doorway a man crossed the street and approached her.
He was a man of uncertain age, of almost any age below the early thirties. As he bowed to her, the girl saw that his hair was dark and curly; that the back of his hand, which was not the hand of a worker, was covered with a black down, and that through the pale olive of his sorely clean-shaven cheeks there shone the blue-black banners of a wiry beard fighting for freedom. His lips were thick until they smiled, above white teeth, in greeting, and his gray glance had the character of an appraisement of whatever it looked upon. Carrie noticed, protruding from his breast-coatpocket, a purple bordered handkerchief.
"Hello," he said.
She looked at him gravely. She had never seen him before, but with his kind she had lately grown enough familiar. Wherever there are women on strike, men of his sort gather, as the vultures gather about dying animals in a jungle. Yet Carrie said nothing. She was, as she had expressed it to Katie, still wondering.