In the pale gold light that flooded through the windows of the sixty-bed dormitory, the women turned down the mussed toweling sheets from the bolsters across the reddish gray spreads.
"My clothes dried on me after the rain, and I do be coughing till my chest is sore," said the girl who had sat next me at the table and was next me in the sleeping room. "There was too many at the dispensary to wait."
Out of a sagging pocket in her creased mackintosh she took a clothes brush. She slipped her skirt from under her coat and with her blue-cold hand passed the flat brush back and forth over the muddy hem.
"If I had a bit o' black for my shoes now—with your clothes I could get me a housemaid's job easy," Her muffler covered the fact that she had no shirtwaist. Then she added encouragingly: "You'd better get a job quick. There's only one blanket on these beds and clothes run down using them for covers at night."
Opposite us a gray-cheeked mother was wrapping a black petticoat about the legs of a small child. She tucked the little girl in the narrow bed they were both to sleep in, and babbled softly to the drowsy child:
"No place yet. My heart do be falling out o' me. Well, I'm not to blame because it's you that keeps me from getting it. You—" she bent over the bed and ended sharply: "Oh, my darling, shall we die in Dublin?"
Through the dusk, above the sound of coughing and canvas stretching as the women settled themselves for the night, there rose the soft voices of two women telling welcome fairy stories to each other:
"It was a wild night," said one. "She was going along the Liffey, and the wind coming up from the sea blew the cape about her face and she half fell into the water. He caught her, they kept company for seven years and then he married her. Who do you suppose he turned out to be? Why, a wealthy London baker. Och, God send us all fortune."
There was silence, then the whisper of the mother:
"Look up to the windows, darling. There's just a taste of daylight left."