“Good Americans is good enough for me,” the superintendent liked to say virtuously. “Bunch o’ soreheads, always kickin’ about something. If it don’t suit ’em here, let ’em go back where they come from! Wish t’ th’ Lawd I dast clean ’em out, but we need ’em!”
Glen found them odd and interesting. There were graybeards among them with simmering passion in their eyes who exhorted fellow workers at stealthy evening meetings, swarthy youths who flared into open resentment at a word, richly colored, full-breasted girls who moved among the mill workers like sly flames, and one outstanding figure, by reason of fervor and superior intelligence, a man called Black Orlo, who edited a tiny paper named The Torch. It came out weekly or monthly, as the editor was able to manage, and was printed in secret on a crude hand press, and while Mr. Carey had ordered its suppression, the sparks still flew, and some of them ignited the red-haired girl.
“Glen,” Luke warned her, “I wouldn’t read that rag! I wouldn’t be caught with it!”
But she continued to read it, for Black Orlo said in vigorous print the things she swallowed back every day of her life, and she found it a safety valve. The man himself, dark, saturnine, unshaven, unsavory, was repulsive to her, but she found his utterances stimulating.
At five o’clock, on her nineteenth birthday, Luke had not returned to his office. She began to lose her hold on the radiant mood of the morning. She had wakened to such a definite sense of occasion but the day had jogged on in its accustomed groove, calmly and colorlessly, and being nineteen did not appear to have any especial significance after all.
Gloriana-Virginia Tolliver, a small putty-colored person at a loom, shot out a lean little claw and caught hold of her skirt as she passed. “Glen,” she wheedled, “yo’all was goin’ to gimme a fairy-tale book to read out of, and learn me the biggest words. Did yo’ jes’ pintly fo’git?”
Glen was remorseful. “I did forget, Glory. I thought of it the very last thing before I went to sleep, and I put it right where I would be sure to see it—it’s the one I read myself when I was little, you know—and then—” she colored swiftly before the uncomprehending eyes of the child—“I was busy this morning—I mean, something happened to make me forget——”
“Oh, hit’s all right!” Gloriana-Virginia reassured her. “Don’t yo’ go to frettin’ yo’sef, Glen! Jes’ any time’ll do. But I sho’ do crave story-readin’, an’ M’liss’, she reckons hit’s jes’ plumb foolishness.” She was a tiny, wizened creature, with curiously shaped hands which did not seem quite human, and her face, with its gentle dark eyes, always made Glen think of the wise and patient countenance of a little monkey. She was her especial favorite of all the mill children and she gave her a repentant hug now, and promised the book without fail for the morning.
The superintendent came hurriedly through the spinning room with an open letter in his hand. His face was red and his mild eyes were round with excitement. He waved an excited greeting to Glen as he went past her. “Say, my ship’s come in, Miss Glen! It sho’ has! Lawdy, Lawdy, I never suspicioned sech a thing could happen outside the movies!” He hurried into Mr. ’Gene Carey’s private office and shut the door behind him, just as Luke Manders came in from the door which led into the lane.
Gloriana-Virginia bent over her frame in earnest absorption as he came nearer them but Glen turned swiftly to greet him.