“I donno,” said the Inger, reflectively, “but I’d best shoot my way down State Street. I don’t seem to get along very fast any other way.”
He had one more visit to make. This was to a railway ticket office, where he deliberately made a purchase and took away a time-card. Then he returned to the employment office.
There he faced a curious sight. The outer room was small and squalid with its bare, dirty floor, its discolored walls, the dusty, curtainless panes of its one window which looked in on a dingy court. About the edge of the room, either seated on deal benches without backs, or standing by the wall, were perhaps twenty women. They were old, they were young, they were relaxed and hopeless, or tense and strained—but the most of them were middle-aged and shabby and utterly negligible. They had not the character of the defeated or the ill or the wretched. They were simply drained of life, and were living. Occasionally an inner door opened and a man’s voice called “Next.” Few of the women talked. One or two of them slept. The window was closed and the air was intolerable.
To all this it took the Inger a moment or two to accustom his eyes. Then he saw Lory. She was sitting on her pack, on the floor, amusing a fretting baby on the knees of its mother, who dozed. In that dun place, the girl’s loveliness was startling, electric. The women felt it, and some sat staring at her.
“If I had that face—” he caught from one.
“Come along out of this, for the Lord’s sake!” said the Inger.
They all turned toward him and toward Lory as she rose, crimsoning as they looked at her. She went to the doorway where he stood.
“I’ll lose my turn if I come now,” she said.
He held her wrist and drew her into the hall. Other women were waiting to get into the room. Well-dressed, watching men went and came.
“You come with me,” said the Inger.