"How could they now, Mrs. Binks?"
"And," concluded Mrs. Binks, overlooking these interruptions in view of the crushing climax she was approaching, "as you've made up your mind not to take the hints I've been givin' you, or the fine offers I've made you, I've got to say it plainly that you're looking too shabby to work any more for me."
Katie smiled her warmest smile.
"Mrs. Binks," she replied, resorting again to prevarication, and presenting the greedily seized money that she still owed her employer, "I'd begun to be afraid that maybe them was your feelin's, an' so yesterd'y at lunch time I bought me the exact duplicate of that walking-suit you've been tryin' to thrust upon me—only I got it next door an' for half your price."
Saying this she had walked to the shallow closet in the fitting-room, taken down her hat and coat, put them on, sung "Good-by" to her consternated fellow-workers, and strolled away forever from that place of employment. She went smiling, but, instead of the curt word that she generally employed, she administered a hand-slap with her open palm to a stranger that accosted her on her journey homeward.
She got work, after some searching, in a candy shop on Eighth Street, but this she had to relinquish when her mother's speedy illness developed into a brief and fatal disease. It was not until the last nursing, relieved by Hermann's assistance, and the funeral were over, that she could again think of labor, and then it was only to get, in a Fourth Street necktie factory, a small position that she lost because she had the effrontery to resent the rather frank overtures of the foreman.
Now, although she had told her cheerful lover nothing about it, she had come to the last ditch. She had been deceived by advertisements, cheated by employment agencies, denied work by the superintendents of scores of shops and manufactories. She was not a skilled laborer, and she had, at first, nothing in the matter of recommendation; she belonged to no trade union; the rent for her little room was dangerously overdue; so, also, were the bills of the baker and the milk dealer upon whom alone she was depending for food; all that she could pledge was in pawn, and, with the soles of her shoes worn through almost to her feet, the elaborate mourning costume that she had been unable to resist was her only badge of material prosperity.
Two avenues of escape were open, were even persistently presented, yet she would regard neither. To take what Hermann pleaded with her to accept, though her hungry heart and her underfed body cried out for it, would have been, she felt well assured, unfairly to handicap her best friend, and, as for turning into that other way—a way into which the streets on every hand seemed so easily to open, she was too wise to consider.
"No thanks," she answered in her soul, as she walked by the leering satyrs, with her black head erect and her lips compressed—"not yet, if you please: not yet, nor never, I think, for starvin' seems some easier and a deal quicker, too."
She had to repeat the words pretty often, for they had come to be a sort of incantation, almost a pious ejaculation, against the enemy, and, as her poverty grew and her chances decreased in inverse ratio, the enemy, like vultures flocking to the fatally wounded, seemed startlingly to increase in force. At first it was a well-dressed corps strayed from Broadway or the Avenue; then it was the bank-clerk hurrying to work and the master mechanic hurrying from it; but finally, so plain are the signs of distress shown upon our faces by the selves that are besieged, it had become the professionally employing, professedly unemployed.