But I didn't want to cry for that. While I looked I got still inside, still and sick, and sure. I guess I felt like I was every factory girl in in New York. The hundred and eighteen wasn't the worst off—I knew that now. I wondered how many of them some Carney had chased, to "help them be a little less lonesome." I wondered how many of them could talk English. I wondered how many of them ever had it in their heads for a minute that there was anything else for them only just what they had. Then I thought about that Greek god of beauty and song. And them hundred and eighteen and most of the other girls and Mis' Bingy and me never even knew there was such a guy.
Two days later Mis' Carney come back. The landlady had a book agent, entertaining him in the parlor, so I had to take her right up to our room. It was nice and clean, and Mis' Bingy always combed her hair and changed her dress after dinner, just like she had at home afternoons, when she'd got the dishes washed up. She was making lace by the window, and the baby was on the floor. It was late, and we'd got a whole pie tin of wieners sizzling over the gas-jet.
"Mis' Carney, you meet Mis' Bingy," I says. But Mis' Carney hardly looked at her. She bent right over the pillow that Mis' Bingy's work was on.
"Do you mean," Mis' Carney said, "that you are actually making the lace? Here in New York?"
"Yes, ma'am," Mis' Bingy says. "Ma taught me—in the old country."
"Have you any of it made?" Mis' Carney says.
Mis' Bingy opened the washstand drawer and took out what she had, tied up in a pillow case. Mis' Carney set on the bed and took it in her hands. After a long time she looked up at me, and her face was lovely.
"Miss Wakely," she says, "I came to tell you what I have for you to do—and I was a good deal bothered—about your friend, Mis' Bingy. But it seems to me that she can earn considerably more than you can—with her lace. I paid six dollars a yard for lace like this not a fortnight ago."
Then she turned to me. "You're going to a school right here in town," she said; "I have arranged everything. And now Mis' Bingy is going to find a larger room and make her lace."
The wieners had burned black before any of us noticed. If ever you seen the sky open back, I guess you know.