At five o'clock there entered the room a pleasant-faced, stout woman, uncommonly homely, who was obviously a prospective employer. She looked about her in embarrassment, and seemed uncertain where to go.
Violet, beside whom the stranger was standing, rose.
"Are you lookin' for the office?" she asked. "I'll show you the way."
The woman seemed to like her thoughtfulness and seemed, after a quick glance, to like her appearance even more.
"I am not particular about the office," said the newcomer; "what I want is a servant. Come outside a minute and talk to me."
Violet followed her into the street, wondering.
As they reached the pavement, the woman smiled: her smile was so pleasant that she almost ceased to be homely.
"I am a practical person," she said, "and as I also loathe and detest these agencies, I always, if possible, engage a girl so that she won't have to pay them their commissions.—Can you do general housework?"
"Yes."
"You don't look very strong."
The girl's heart throbbed. Mrs. Turner had said that dismissal was the result not of what had been done but of the thing's concealment.
"That's only because I was ill awhile ago," began Violet. "I had been in trouble——"
"But you're quite well now?" the woman interrupted.
"Quite," answered Violet.
She did not know how now to proceed; but the stranger, still smiling, soon gave her a chance.
"Any reference?"
"No, ma'am, I haven't no reference."
"How does that come?"
"I was fired from my last place." She took a breath, then a greater one, and concluded: "I was fired because the woman I worked for found out that I had been in trouble."
The stranger promptly ceased to smile.
"What sort of trouble?" she inquired.
Violet saw that she had made a fatal error, but she did not know how to end it except by proceeding.
"You know," she stammered, "there was a man——"
The stranger raised a plump, gloved hand.
"Don't tell me that," she said. "I have no right to the details. I think I understand your motive, and it's creditable, I must say. But, my dear, I am by no means a beautiful woman and I have a very susceptible husband—very. I'm afraid I must be going along."
And along she went, leaving Violet in a tossing sea of emotion. Mrs. Turner had lied, which meant the girl must lie; this later employer had said that the woman who had been enticed was generally supposed anxious to entice others, a theory that also meant that Violet must lie. She returned to the agency, convinced that her error had lain only in a lack of skill at deception.
No other customers appeared during the rest of the afternoon, and when the agency closed its doors for the night Violet, too alarmed by the stories she had heard to trust herself to one of its beds, sought the nearest policeman—she was losing her fear of policemen at last—and had him direct her to a cheap but respectable hotel. She had a little money and she paid gladly for a room that was nearly comfortable; but she could not sleep, and she returned to the employment-office early in the morning with red eyes and swollen cheeks.
Until long after noon she sat there, waiting. She watched everyone that entered; she looked at first eagerly and at last appealingly at every possible employer; but somehow the woman in the inner room never sent for her.
At last Violet herself walked through the rear door.
The frowzy person with the calculating eyes looked at her sharply.
"You back?" she asked.
"I haven't left," said Violet.
"Why, I heard you tried to steal a customer yesterday afternoon."
"That wasn't no customer; it was a friend of mine."
"Oh! Well, what do you want now?"
"A job."
"I know that. What else?"
"I want to give you this: I have six dollars, an' I'll give you five down if you can get me a decent job in a decent house this afternoon, an' then I'll give you two dollars a week out of my first three weeks' pay."
The frowzy person screwed her lips in a downward curve that was probably intended for a smile.
"I've had that percentage game handed out to me about a thousand times before," she remarked, "an' I believe in such money when I get it. Still, I don't mind seein' that five."
Violet produced it, and saw it swiftly vanish down a black cotton stocking.
"All right. Tell you what I'll do. Here's a woman down on Washington Square wants a maid to wait on table. Can you do it?"
"I can try; but of course I've never done it before."
"I'll rent you a couple of references in the name of Bella Nimick—that'll cost you two dollars more, an' I guess I'll have to trust you for it—an' the cook down there—she deals with us—she'll give you some pointers on the job. You'll find it a good place. They're old swells, an' the name's Chamberlin."
Violet lost no time in seeking this new address. She found it to be a large brick house, with white marble steps, facing the leafy square from the north, and looking across the broad green lawn toward a church that towered into the blue skies by day and by night reached up toward Heaven with a fiery cross. The cook, to whom, through the areaway, she made her application, proved to be an ample Swedish woman, with a heart fashioned in true proportion to her body, and a round, placid face that spoke well for her mistress.
That mistress, Violet was without delay informed, was an invalid, whose ills, if mostly fanciful, were at least fancied with a force sufficient to keep her in town and in the house all summer long. Her husband—she had remarried after a divorce—passed the warm months visiting more wealthy friends along the rocky Maine coast, and her son ran in to see her between such invitations to Newport and Narragansett as he could secure. A daughter by the second union, a girl of sixteen, remained to care for her mother, and this child and a professional nurse, whose long service made her almost a member of the family, completed the household.
Violet was presented to Mrs. Chamberlin, a frail woman with a white, delicate face, lying on a couch in a darkened library, and, her references being casually read, was promptly engaged. She was to receive eighteen dollars a month for far lighter work than had been her portion under the sway of Mrs. Turner, and, as Bella Nimick, began at once to see that a better time was before her.
Objections there of course were, but these were not of a sort that either Violet's previous experience or present necessity permitted her to observe. Brought up in wealth, Mrs. Chamberlin's ideals had not been improved by that decline of fortune consequent upon her marriage. Neither in a practical nor in an executive sense had she received any training, and, though she would have told you that household management was woman's true sphere, she actually knew as little of it as she did of the wholesale drug trade. It had never occurred to her that cooking was even distantly related to chemistry and dietetics; scrubbing, dusting, and sweeping to hygiene, or domestic administration to bookkeeping. By the same token, the two servants had to share a dark, narrow room in the basement, had no sitting-room save the kitchen and, so far as social life went, would have been, had they depended upon the Chamberlin house, twin Selkirks on a Juan Fernandez.
But Violet was happy. Her health, if it did not improve, at least did not noticeably decline. The work, if it was hard, was at least possible of accomplishment. And within a week she had made herself so valuable to both her mistress and her mistress's nurse that these potentates found continuous need of her.
Then the first blow fell.
She had just put away the last of the dishes from an early dinner and was passing the barred front window of the basement when, from the sunset across the square, a shadow descended to the floor within. She looked up, startled. In the areaway a dapper, dark, flashily dressed young man was standing, and the young man was Angel.
Violet darted away from the window, but Angel, reaching through the bars, calmly raised the sash, which, even in the warmest weather, was drawn against the noise and dust of the street. His dark face was flushed, and though his wet, red lips were smiling, they smiled evilly.
"No treecks," he commanded. "You come to me. I wanta talk."
Violet did not answer. She huddled into the farthest corner.
"Stan' out!" continued Angel, his lips still curved. "You theenka me so dumb? I am sharpa 'nough for see you. You come here, or I go ope stairs an' reenga da bell."
Slowly, like the bird advancing to the swaying serpent, she obeyed him.
"Now," he said, when they were face to face, "you alone?"
She thanked Heaven that they were. The cook was in the kitchen.
"Poot on you' hat an' come alonga with me."
"I won't!" said Violet.
"You do eet!"
"I can't. The missus won't let me. It ain't my night off."
"Eef you don't, I go ope stairs an' tell all abouta you."
"I don't care. I won't go!"
"Queeck!"
"No."
"Then da woman she fire you, an' I get you when you come out alone."
Violet knew that he meant it.
"Where do you want to take me?" she asked. "I won't let you never take me back to Rose's."
"No fear," laughed Angel, shaking his oily curls. "Meess Rosie she would not stan' to have you near."
"Then what do you want?"
"I want you come to District Attorney's, da place you go witha that fine gentleman Dyker. You won'ta be hurt. You can peeck out any cop on da way to go along, an' you weell knowa da place."
"Does he want me—that lawyer I talked to there before?"
"I been to see him an' tell him we come."
"Then what am I to do when I get there?"
"Taka back all you say for thata Dyke'. Da's all: no more—only so mooch. I won't bother you no more; thata lawyer won't bother you no more; Dyker won't bother you no more. You do that, or losa da job. Wheech?"
Violet put her hand before her eyes. She knew as well as a wiser woman what had happened. Angel had traced her to Katie's, to the hospital, to the settlement, to the employment-agency—he was doubtless familiar with such places—to this house. Rose's latest captive had been turned out on the streets before the raid and lost to sight. The entire white-slavery charge now rested on Violet's testimony, and Angel's purpose was to have her withdraw the affidavit she had made. In her present condition, she could not, she thought, be of any further use to him; that purpose served, he would be only too glad to let her again hide herself, and, hidden here, with Dyker elected and engaged by newer cares, she might escape both friends and foes. Terror drove out all desire for revenge upon Rose Légère; it drove out even the power to keep her promise to Dyker. All that she wanted was her job.
"All right," she said. "Wait till I go upstairs and get permission."
"No treecks," cautioned Angel. "Eef you try treecks, I go upstair' myself."
She promised, and left him, presenting to Mrs. Chamberlin in the library, a moment later, a face that bore out her story of the illness of a friend.
"Well," said the invalid, "if you go out I shall be certain to need you; but I suppose there is no help for it. Don't be gone more than an hour."
Violet joined Angel in the area, and went with him, but, though she was disposed toward silence, she was surprised to find the Italian in a pleasant, even a genial, mood.
In his moment of success, he was well-nigh magnanimous. He bore not a trace of malice, seeming to regard the whole matter as a game in which all the moves on both sides had been in accord with the rules. He chattered a variety of gossip about everything and every person save those who were most intimately concerned in his present action, and only as they neared the office, where a light showed that the young assistant had remained in accordance with the word that Angel had previously brought him, did he touch upon the matter in hand.
"No treecks, now," he cautioned. "All you gotta do ees tella heem you were Rosie's frien' an' she hit you, so you gotta drunk an' wanted to maka trouble."
"Won't he be cross?" asked Violet, her agitation returning anew.
"Naw," Angel reassured her. "He's used to sucha t'ings. Don' forgot, an' I give you five doll'."
They entered the office that Violet just recalled as having visited with Dyker in her fever-dream. At a desk, covered with neatly arranged piles of papers sat the young assistant, who, having then seen her red with illness, and now seeing her still white from its recovery, might well suppose that their first meeting was the result of drunken malice.
"Here she ees," smiled Angel, "like I promise. She ees a gooda girl now, an' sorry she tell you da deeferent story an' maka trouble."
Angelelli had told Violet the truth: the young man was indeed used to such things—so used to them that he knew protest was fruitless and that his inquiry must be formal.
"You want to withdraw your deposition?" he asked. He was a kindly young man with a thin face.
"Do I what?" asked Violet.
"He means——" began Angel.
"I mean," interrupted the lawyer, "do you want to take back the story you told me about Rose Légère? This case is on the calendar for to-morrow, so if you mean to take back what you said, you had better do it now."
"It won't get me into no trouble?"
The young man raised his eyebrows.
"What would be the use?" he inquired. "No, it won't get you into any trouble."
"Then I'll take it back," said Violet.
"You'll have to be sworn, you know."
"She don' minda that," said Angel. "Do you, Violet?"
The girl shook her head, and a clerk was called and administered an oath so rapidly that Violet could understand no word of it.
"You're doing this of your own free will—just because you want to?" resumed the lawyer, donning his professional air, and seeming to become infected with the clerk's rapidity of utterance. "You are not swayed by any promise of pecuniary reward—that is because you're paid for it? And there has been no force or threat used to compel you to do it—I mean you haven't been told you'd be hurt if you backed down?"
Violet bowed in token of a desire to answer these questions in whatever way was necessary to her bargain, and the new deposition proceeded in the same manner and along the lines that Angel had laid down. The clerk hurried because he wanted to get home; the lawyer hurried because he thoroughly disbelieved every word that was written; and, severe as Violet had feared that the ordeal would be, it was over far sooner than she had expected.
Angel, still loyal to his word, saw her safely home.
"Now," he said, as he left her at the areaway, "nobody weell ever any more bother you. Good-night."
He raised his hat and went away, but, as he turned, he pressed into her cold hand a crisp, new bill.
Violet's fingers closed about it silently. She had earned it.
The trial of Rose Légère was precisely the farce that Violet had expected and that Angel had planned. In ninety of such cases out of every hundred, the chief witnesses for the state are suppressed by fear or force, and the prosecution collapses. Thus, in the present instance, had not the newspapers made first-page announcements of the Légère woman's arrest and so attracted to the case the momentary attention of an effervescing moral public, the District Attorney's office would, in fact, have contented itself with submitting the indictment and asking for a verdict of not guilty.
With Violet in the hospital during the session of the Grand Jury, Wesley, now a man of power, had been able to refresh Larry Riley's memory to such a point that, in the hands of the prosecutor, the policeman's evidence was sufficient to insure the finding of a true bill; but when the case was called for trial the situation was vastly changed. The girl that had followed Violet into the net had been cast back into the sea of the city and utterly swallowed up. Violet herself had recanted. The elder inmates of the Légère establishment regarded the law as their natural enemy and, had they been disposed to assist it, could in no wise have been regarded as credible witnesses. The action had, therefore, to rest entirely upon Riley's testimony, and for Riley's testimony there was virtually no corroboration procurable.
"You're a good thing—I don't think," remarked the weary-faced young Assistant District Attorney as, on the morning of the trial, he met Dyker in the corridor of the court. "We shoved this case about five years ahead on the calendar to please you, and the night before it's called your witness comes to my office and eats her deposition."
Wesley had already heard that piece of news. When, in order to keep an eye upon Violet, he had, some time previously, sought her at Katie's tenement, and had received a series of uncredited vows to the effect that the Irish girl had no idea of the whereabouts of her late charge, he had begun to look for a recantation. It was the sort of game that he had himself frequently played, and he blamed his own lack of foresight in not better providing against it. Then other interests had arisen. The campaign came on apace; there were newer enemies than Rose to be dealt with, and, when the wires leading from the District Attorney's office had informed him that the expected had occurred, he received the word with calm philosophy.
"Well," he carelessly laughed in reply to the young assistant's sally, "that's always the way: we elect you people into your jobs and then you think that we ought to get up your cases for you and hold your witnesses."
He went on his way, unconcerned. Scarcely less concerned, the young assistant, knowing that his cause was lost, proceeded into court with a solemn air calculated to convince an outraged public morality of his high intent; challenged juror after juror with a frowning brow; outlined his case with biting logic; examined Riley, as the officer on the beat, together with the other policemen that had made the arrest, in an heroic style eminently pleasing to the reporters; finally worked himself into a profuse perspiration of Ciceronian invective against the prisoner and, mopping his weary face, sat down.
Equally without concern, and knowing his cause was won, counsel for the defense, a suave little personage, played his rôle as the cues came to him: retained his suavity through an opening statement flatly denying that of his learned young friend; pretended to drop a little of the suavity through a series of cutting cross-examinations that left nothing of the policeman's vague testimony; and gave an excellent imitation of throwing away all the rest of the suavity when, in an impassioned speech, quite up to that of his learned young friend, he declared that he would call no witness (which he did not dare to do), because the Commonwealth had wholly failed to make out its case (which was quite true), and because a respectable lady, the daughter of a mother, had been outraged by ruffianly officers, her humble home ruthlessly wrecked, and her livelihood endangered (which was absolutely false).
So, at last, without any pretense at concern whatever, the bottle-nosed personage on the bench ceased drawing pigs on his blotter, and, sharing the common knowledge of the fate of the case, gravely instructed the unwashed jury that if they thought two and two were four they should so find, whereas if, on the other hand, they believed four to be the sum of one and one plus one and one they were to perform their sworn duty and so report. And the unwashed jury, without leaving the court-room, declared Rose Légère an innocent woman.
The innocent woman, still the pleasantly stout lady of the brewery advertisement, shook gratefully the soft paw of her forensic defender.
"Thank God that's over," said she, with quite as much feeling and quite as much reason as many others of us return praise to Heaven for benefits that originate a good deal nearer earth.
The suave defender smiled.
"Yes," he said, "thank God—and payme."
"You'll get a check in the morning," Rose replied, "an' I haven't a grudge against nobody, though I do think that other lawyer might 'a' got less gay with his tongue."
"He was only doing his duty, Mrs. Légère. It's the law, you know."
"What if it is? I didn't make it. What I don't like to see is the way you people'll go back on your friends because somethin' or other's the law."
She gathered her silk skirts free of contamination by the low crowd in the court-room, and made her way to a waiting taxicab outside.
"I think," she said, as that vehicle began to pump through the streets, "I'll pay a little call on Mr. Wesley Dyker."
She found him, somewhat surprised beneath his drooping lids, at his office, and he immediately agreed to see her alone.
"Now then," she said pleasantly, seating herself unasked before his desk and leaning easily back in her chair, "what I want to know is: Am I goin' to be let alone?"
Dyker stroked his crisp mustache. He wanted to gain time.
"You were acquitted, then?" he asked.
"Looks like it, don't it? See here, Wes, I know where all my trouble come from, an' I can pretty well guess how it come; but I'm willin' to ferget it if you are. Are you?"
Dyker's slow eyes were raised to hers, then lowered.
"Yes," he said.
"All right. Now you'll need me an' I'll lend a hand, but I've got to know first off if I'm not goin' to be interfered with."
"You had better see O'Malley about that."
"No, I hadn't. You went to see him first; go to him again."
"I——" Dyker twirled a pencil between his white fingers. "I shan't be sorry if I do?"
"You will not."
"I may count on that, may I?"
Rose squared herself in her chair.
"Got a talkin'-machine around here?" she inquired.
"Why, no."
"Because I'd like to have some soft music while I tell you the story of my life—see?"
"I don't believe you have to tell that."
"Yes, I do. I want you to know just what I am; then you'll see whether you can depend on me. I was brought up decent—that's the truth. I had my church an' Sunday-school like you had, an' perhaps more. The other sort of school I had to quit early, because my old man wasn't paid enough to keep me on, an' I had to go to work myself. I was under the age; but I swore I wasn't, so that was all right, an' after I'd tramped over the whole town, I got a job filin' letters an' addressin' circulars in a young broker's office. I was mighty little, but I was mighty good lookin'. I thought he took me for what I could do, but I found out he took me for my looks."
She spoke quite without emotion, and Dyker, in spite of himself, was interested.
"It cost that broker a lot to live," she continued; "so much that he couldn't afford to get married. When he'd got through with me, after a few years, an' the baby was dead in the hospital, my people were so damned respectable that I didn't dare go home to them. Wall Street had been plungin'; nobody'd buy stocks; I couldn't get a job there. Times was hard and I couldn't find a place anywhere else. It was up to me to starve to death, go into a home an' be marked for life, or get real money the best way I could."
She paused, and Wesley found himself interjecting an urging "Well?"
"Well, I got the money. My broker put me up in a flat. He stole the cash to do it, an' when the fly-cops got next, he blew out his brains. I was still high and dry, so I got a couple of girls to help me. Then I met Mike O'Malley's brother—the one that's dead now—an' he squared things for me so's I could open up the place you knew. He owned my joint an' was right an' regular. He saw to it I wasn't bothered, an' we paid for protection an' furnished an address when his brother needed one for voters. I never had no trouble 'till O'Malley's brother was dead an' you queered me with Mike himself."
"And is that all?"
"Yes, that's all. It's about what you'd learn from any other woman in my line of work. But I'll tell you one thing: I got my girls however I could—a lot of 'em because your friends brought 'em, an' everyone that was brought that way I paid for, fair an' square an' good an' heavy; I had to keep the women down because expenses was so high; but no man was ever cheated in my place, an' no man was ever robbed with my knowledge. I may have bad habits of my own, even for my sort of a life; but I always treat my customers on the level, an' I always see that my girls treat 'em on the level, too."
"What about the hangers-on?" asked Wesley.
"You mean about Angel? Well, I played double because I didn't know who was goin' to be on top, an' in this business you've always got to be on the winnin' side. Now you are on top an' there can't be no question. I'm in this line because I've got to live; I couldn't do nothin' else; an' I'm goin' to keep on in it as long as I live. You see now that I've always been on the level in one way; you see that I haven't no reason now not to be on the level in the other way.—Will you go an' fix it with O'Malley?"
He did fix it. He fixed it that afternoon, and he fixed it so firmly that, within ten days, Rose, with her former minions gathered from the corners where she had hidden them, was living and prospering in the house that Riley had raided.
Impartial Justice had been satisfied.
Destiny, busy as she had been with the affairs of Rose Légère, had not neglected the usually serene residence of Mrs. Ferdinand Wapping Chamberlin. For ten hours the invalid herself had been fretful. This had reacted upon the gentle nature of Mistress Madelaine, who had in turn made the nurse to suffer, and the nurse, in her own phrase, had "taken it out on" Lena Johnson, the Swedish cook.
"An' it's all ban because that son of another husband ban comin' home," said the naturally good-tempered Lena, in an effort to pass along the general discontent to Violet.
"What of that?" Violet asked. "Is he home so seldom that we've got to get the whole house ready for him?"
It appeared from Lena's answer that the young man was home far more frequently than his mother's finances could well afford. When he honored the Chamberlin roof with his presence, he generally managed to secure all the money within reach and to devote that money to sociological researches that kept him out until the lesser hours of the morning. These stubborn pursuits were, it seemed, highly disapproved of by both his mother and his sister, yet both his mother and his sister hated his father, the divorced husband of the remarried Mrs. Chamberlin; and as the son and brother constantly threatened that any interference would result in a transfer of his affectionate borrowings to the bank-account of his sire, both women were, during his intermittent residence with them, torn between their improbation of his pursuits and their fear that he would desert the maternal house for the paternal club.
"What's his name?" asked Violet, as she lent a hand at the preparation of dinner.
"Philip," answered Lena, "an' it ought to be Hungry Haakon."
And yet, when the prodigal reached the house that evening and, admitting himself with his own latchkey, hurried into the library where his mother and sister, the former on the couch and the latter seated beside it, were awaiting the announcement that dinner was served, he would not have appeared, to any stranger that could see him, a much worse young man than most young men.
"Hello!" he cried, kissing both women lightly on the cheek. "Sister more of a lure for susceptible hearts than ever!"
"Much chanceIhave!" murmured black-eyed Madelaine, brushing aside a careful blonde curl disordered by his onslaught.
"And theMuttergetting better every day," pursued the unabashed youth.
"Your mother," said Mrs. Chamberlin, her heavy brows rising almost to the level of her lace cap, "will never be herself again, and you well know it."
"Poof! A lean horse for a long race,Mutter."
Mrs. Chamberlin waved a thin hand in dismissal of all discussion.
"If you mean to dress for dinner," she said, "you had better begin, Philip."
"No use. I have an engagement for to-night in circles where evening clothes are rarely considered quite proper, and I washed up at the club."
"Oh, then you stopped there before coming to your home?"
"It was on my way."
"And you of course saw that terrible man?"
This being the term in which Mrs. Chamberlin habitually referred to the husband that had been so wicked as to permit her, after her elopement with Chamberlin, to institute and win a suit for divorce, her son merely nodded.
"But what's the use of bothering about that?" he demanded. "It was on the way, I tell you. Cheer up: one may smile and smile and be a woman still."
But his hearers, by way of response to this advice, sighed audibly.
"I don't think it was very considerate of you, Philip," vouchsafed the younger. "You must remember that when you got that last check from mother——"
"Madelaine!" cautioned Mrs. Chamberlin.
"I don't care, dear. Philip, you must remember that when you got that last check from mother, it was on your distinct promise that you would not see your father again for a year."
"And don't you remember," retorted Philip, "that I afterwards, upon reflection, distinctly withdrew that distinct promise as utterly and in essence unfilial? A woman can always remember more things than a man has forgotten, and forget whatever she doesn't want to remember. If it had been an honest woman instead of an honest man that Diogenes was looking for, he'd have had to throw away his lantern and hire a portable lighthouse."
But he kissed the girl as he said this, and pressed his mother's hand.
"The trouble with you two," he declared, "is that you don't get about enough. Seclusion makes you serious."
"I wish," said Mrs. Chamberlin, "that you had brought me back the news that you had grown more like us."
"More serious? Still harping on your son, dear! No, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I've about given up all hope of marrying money, and marrying anything else is an impossibility. I must be getting on in years. You know how it is: as we grow older we become more particular and less desirable—when we're old enough to have learned properly to play the game of love, we're too old to play it."
"You're a mere boy," observed Madelaine, with a toss of her blonde curls.
"And you talk like one," said Mrs. Chamberlin, smiling in spite of herself.
"I'd never think of accepting anybody so young as you are," the girl added.
Philip pulled her pink ear.
"That's right, Queen Mab," he agreed; "wait till a man is large and round and settled. And when you do marry, marry for keeps: a little marriage is a dangerous thing, eh,Mutter?"
"Philip!"
What more she would have said to this criticism of her own estate, Mrs. Chamberlin's son was not just then to hear, for a Japanese gong interrupted her with the melodious announcement of dinner, and the son snatched his protesting mother in his arms and, with Madelaine following, bore her into the brightly lighted dining-room.
He looked at the shining silver and gleaming linen and glass and china, and he saw the pale liquid that filled one of the glasses at his own accustomed place.
"Good!" he cried. "I hope Lena's hand has not forgotten its cunning. Stolen waters are sweet, but the best cocktail is a dry one."
And then, with his living burden still in his strong arms, he looked across the table and into the eyes of the new servant.
The new servant, from the shadow, returned that gaze. She saw before her, in the person of her employer's son, Philip Beekman, the black-haired, gray-eyed young waster that had once promised her help in the house of Rose Légère. On her part, Violet could have no doubt, and it was only with the utmost exercise of self-control that she continued her duties. But for Philip certainty was not immediately obtainable. He saw many girls in the surroundings in which he had first seen Violet, and her he would probably long since have forgotten had it not been for the appeal that she had made to his surface emotions. Nevertheless, the walls of his own home did not, in this case, form a setting that made for easy identification, and, besides, though this woman had recovered some degree of her health, the best of her looks would never return. Beauty is the quality most remembered by such men as Philip Beekman, and beauty lost is the best disguise against them. Philip, therefore, quietly deposited his mother in her chair, and continued his easy raillery until the soup had been served and the little family had been left, for a time, alone.
"New maid?" he then casually inquired.
"Yes," said Mrs. Chamberlin, "and actually a fairly competent one."
"What's her name?"
"Bella."
"Any more?"
"Really, I don't recall her family name, Philip. What possible difference can it make?"
"I suppose," said Madelaine, "that he thinks her pallor interesting."
"Nonsense, Madelaine!"
"Her last name is Nimick, Philip."
"Oh!" said Philip, inwardly reflecting that, in the nature of things, a name could not much signify. "I was merely attracted by the fact that she didn't precisely resemble a servant. Have you never noticed how all men look as if they belonged to the class below their own, and all women to the class above? It seems as if a man could never rise above his environment, and as if a woman could never descend to hers."
He did not again refer to the subject, but the subject was, during all the meal, keenly conscious that his gray eyes were covertly watching her. She moved about the room with increasing difficulty. Her hand shook as she brought the salad-bowl, and she spilled some of his coffee on the cloth.
As soon as Lena had left the kitchen and gone upstairs, Beekman came into the pantry. His manner, neither that which she had once known nor that which she had more lately observed, was quick and threatening; his frank face was flushed with anger.
"Your name is Violet," he said in a voice that, though low, shook under the restraint that he put upon it.
She was standing beneath a gas-jet, a little column of dishes in her hand. The cruel light showed the havoc that had been wrought upon her, but it also showed the marks that no years or change could alter.
"Yes," she said, her own voice scarce a whisper.
"Did you——" he bit his lip. "Did you come here to scare me?" he demanded.
She put down the dishes.
"What do you mean, Mr. Beekman?"
"Because I haven't any money, you know."
"Mr. Beekman!"
She put her hand before her face, and he saw that he had been wrong.
"I beg your pardon," he sulkily said. "In the circumstances, it wasn't an unnatural supposition, though my mother thoroughly understands my manner of life; but I see now that I shouldn't have said it."
He paused, and then, because he hated to be in the wrong, he hunted about for another excuse for attack, and, finding one, became more angry than before.
"Only how dared you," he asked, "how did you dare to come into this house?"
Violet bowed her russet head.
"I didn't know it was yours," she said.
"You didn't know?"
"How could I? Lena didn't happen to say nothin' about you before to-day, an' your mother has a different name."
"Don't talk of my mother!" he commanded.
Had Violet known all the truth of her mistress, it would probably have flashed over even the servant's dull brain that the difference between a woman beaten into slavery and a woman that married the man who, during her first marriage, had been her lover, was a difference not of kind, but of degree, and of a degree decidedly in the ethical favor of the former. However, she held her tongue.
It was the best shield she could have chosen. Through silence few fits of anger are strong enough to reach, and the quick temper of Beekman began slowly to spend itself.
"I don't see how you could come into any decent house," he grumbled, "no matter whether you knew whose it was or not."
Still Violet did not answer.
"I suppose you didn't think about that, though," Philip pursued.
Violet was as yet too stunned at all adequately to feel. With a shaking finger she drew invisible arabesques upon the shelf beside her.
"How did you get away from Rose's, anyhow?" he asked.
Slowly she raised her head. Slowly she fixed him with her tired blue eyes. And slowly, still drawing arabesques now unregarded, she answered:
"Does that make much difference, Mr. Beekman?"
"Wasn't I interested?" he blustered.
"Because, you see," she concluded, "however it was, it wasn't by none of the help you promised."
The thrust just pierced his armor of convention.
"Oh, well," he said, "what could I do? I wanted to help—you know that—but what could I do?"
"Nothin'!" Her eyes clouded as if they looked at something which, though clear to sight, passed all explaining. "Nothin', I suppose."
The words lent him courage.
"And I can't do anything now," he went on, his anger cold, but his determination unchanged. "I'm sorry for you—on my word of honor, I am sorry for you with my whole heart, Violet—but you can't stay here—you must see that you can't stay in this house another night."
Her eyes were still on his.
"I know you think that," she replied, as if puzzled and seeking a solution. "An' I know what you think goes.—But, myself, I can't see why not."
"But, Violet, just consider!" he cried, his hands outstretched.
"You wanted me to get away an' get a decent job," she dully answered.
"Not here."
"What's the difference? What's the difference whether it's here or somewheres else? I can't see."
"But here all the time I should know."
"Don't you know, wherever you are, about lots of others that don't get away? An' does that hurt you? Wouldn't you know about me wherever you are, about me wherever I went? An' would that hurt me?"
"You don't understand!"
He seemed to charge her with her admitted incomprehension as if it were a crime.
"No, I don't," she repeated.
"Can't you see that if you were somewhere else, it would be different?"
"I'm sorry, but I can't."
"Not if you were where nobody knew about you?"
"No, I don't see that, Mr. Beekman. I haven't got any disease to give people."
"I wasn't thinking that."
"Well, you wouldn't tell on me to the people I went to if I went somewheres else?"
"Certainly I wouldn't."
"An' you don't think I'd steal, do you?"
"Of course not."
"Nor—nor get anybody who was kind to me into the sort of a hell I worked so hard to get myself out of?"
"How could I think it? What are you driving at, Violet?"
"This: that if all them things is the way you say, I'm fit for any job I'm able to do—an' I'm able to do this one."
"Not in this house."
"What's the difference where?" Her voice was still low, and her words still came slowly; but she was, however imperfectly and painfully, beginning to think—which is a very dangerous thing in any exploited individual. "What's the difference where?" she asked. "What you know don't make me no worse, an' what I know don't make me no better. The truth's the truth. What's happened's happened. I used to be a girl in Rose's house, no matter if I was now workin' in your house an' you do know what I used to be. Wherever I am, I'm what I am; your knowin' it don't help or hinder; an' if I'm fit for next door I'm fit for here."
Philip Beekman passed his long fingers through his black hair. It was the gesture she had seen him employ on that remembered night at Rose's, but now it had a new significance. The young man was as much the creature of his surroundings as Violet was the creation of hers. He could no more appreciate her point of view than she could comprehend his. It was as if they spoke different tongues. Beekman was powerless to argue further, and when a man reaches that condition, he takes a firm stand upon authority.
"All right," he said; "we won't waste words. The hard fact is that you've got to go. I'm sorry, but you've got to go and go now."
She bowed her head; she had finished.
He wished she would answer; he wished she would fly into a rage; but as she remained dumb, he continued:
"I suppose your hat and jacket are in the kitchen. You can drop me a card telling me where to send your trunk. I'll explain this to your—to my mother somehow. I'll do whatever I can for you—outside."
A slow shake of her russet head was her reply.
"I'll give you a recommendation."
"I won't need none, Mr. Beekman."
"I—I think I've got fifty dollars somewhere in my clothes."
"I was paid my wages only this mornin'."
He looked at her in gray-eyed amazement.
"But I say," he began, "you aren't going to—you don't mean you won't——"
She did not answer. She moved slowly and quietly away. She went to the kitchen, got her shabby beaver hat and her long coat.
Philip, in the pantry, remained as she had left him, erect, eyes and mouth wide.
A moment later he heard the area door open and close.
"An twent' from Rosie Légère's," said Angel, "maka two hundre'."
Hermann Hoffmann, alone behind the bar in Schleger's saloon, and half asleep as he bent over a thumbed and stained copy of the last evening's paper, scarcely raised his head. It was half-past one o'clock in the morning. Except for Angelelli and the man to whom he was talking at a table by the door, the place was empty of customers, and so unconcerned were these two late-comers that, had he wished it, every word of their conversation could have been taken down by the bar-keeper.
But the bar-keeper did not wish it. He knew both the men, and had heard something of the character of each, as every good bar-keeper comes to know and to hear about most of the regular patrons of the establishment that employs him. With Angel he had even had a nodding acquaintance in the days of the brewery-wagon, and since he had donned the white jacket he had seen often the narrow-chested, stoop-shouldered, slouching Austrian now in conference with the dapper Rafael. He had been told that this Austrian, with his bristling brown hair, pale face, and thin mouth, pulled downward at one corner by an ugly scar, made his regular living by appropriating the wages of a girl that he nightly drove forth to scour the dark streets, earning what money she could from what looks were left her and stealing what she could not earn. And Hermann knew that, now an election was near, both of these proud possessors of the suffrage were doing their exacted duty for the powers that permitted them to thrive, and were, like the army of others in their own profession, through all New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, through the tenderloin of every American city, providing for the voting of repeaters, of dead men, of men that never were, in the interests of whichever of the two great political parties happens to be in control of the city where such votes are needed.
"Mirka," said Angel, laying down his gold-rimmed fountain-pen and looking up from the back of the envelope on which he had been making his calculations, "we weell need a hundre' more."
Mirka, the Austrian, tried to smile, but that ugly scar at the corner of his mouth caught the smile in the making and pulled it down into a sinister sneer.
"I can smoke out fifty if you can," he said.
"Da sama kind?"
"Yes."
Hermann, behind the bar, frankly yawned. He remembered, with a slow smile, how, when he had first come across such practices, years ago, he had gone to the ward-leader of that party in whose interests the work was being done. He remembered how this potentate had first assured him that he had "heard wrong," and finally met his persistence with a warning that he had better keep his mouth shut. He remembered how, at the rival headquarters, he had been told that there was always a mass of such evidence, none of which could be effectively used before election, and how, when he had ventured to suggest that an election-offense was punishable after election-day, he had been ridiculed. And lastly, he knew that his own Socialist friends had already all the information that he had now obtained, but could do no more at the polls than lodge protests that would be overruled by the election-judges and subsequently pigeon-holed by the courts.
"All right," Angel was saying, as he pocketed his pen and tore the envelope into small bits, which he tossed deftly across the room into the gutter beneath the bar. "I feexa heem. I geta da rest."
The two men rose and stepped to the bar for a nightcap of whiskey.
Already the Austrian had drunk more than was good for his temper, but Hermann, whose eye was usually exact in discerning such matters, was sleepy to-night, and did not notice this. Angel poured a bountiful portion from the cool metal-stoppered bottle that Hoffmann shoved clanking toward him. Mirka decanted even more, and then momentarily released his hold of the bottle to speak to his companion. Hermann, thinking both men satisfied, reached for the liquor.
"Keep your dirty fingers off of that!" cried Mirka, with no trace of his nationality in his speech. "Can't you wait till I pour a real man's drink?"
Hermann flushed.
"It's a bath, den, you're goin' to dake?" he asked.
"I will if I like, you damned fool!" rejoined Mirka, his eyes warming.
Hermann's blue glance surveyed the uncouth, slouching figure.
"All righd," he said; "you need von."
The Austrian glowered. Then, tilting back his bristling head, he tossed the liquor down his long throat.
"Give me another, you Dutchie," he ordered, pushing his glass across the bar.
Angel began a quieting word, but Mirka broke in, still addressing Hermann.
"Get a move on, or I'll break yer face, Dutchie!" he insisted.
Hermann's jaw was suddenly set in a rigid line. He remained motionless.
"Come on, now!" said Mirka.
"Don' maka these treecks," protested Angelelli, dividing his plea between his hearers, and placing his hand upon the Austrian's shoulder.
"You shut up!" retorted Mirka, shaking himself free. "And you, you Dutch fool, give me a drink—quick!"
Hermann did not obey. He saw at last the fellow's condition.
"You've had enough," he said.
"Mind yer own business," snapped the Austrian.
"Dot's what I'm doing," answered Hermann, calmly reaching for the empty glasses. "You're drunk."
He had hardly spoken before Mirka, his habitual lassitude dropping from him like a discarded cloak, made a quick leap that brought him half across the bar. The glasses crashed, the bottle was overturned, and in the Austrian's waving, clenched right hand there flashed a knife.
It was a moment of action, but a moment only. From one side of the bar, Angel had gripped Mirka by the waist and was pulling him backward; on the other, the powerful German had caught the threatening fist and now, with a quick twist, sent the knife plunging into the tub below the beer-spigots.
Spluttering obscenities, the Austrian was dragged to the position from which he had made his attack.
"You keepa quiet!" commanded Angel of the one combatant, and to the other: "You getta more fresh with your mouth an' I getta you fired."
Hermann had recovered the knife and was now calmly drying it upon a bar-towel. Such incidents were not unusual in his occupation and, now that this one was closed, he could afford to smile his answer to Rafael.
Mirka, on the other hand, though still tightly embraced by Angel, was trembling with rage.
"I'll get you for this, Dutchie!" he declared.
"So?" said Hermann. He still smiled, but he was tired of being called Dutchie, and his tongue ran just a hair's breadth ahead of his caution. "Try it," he concluded; "try it, you dirty Austrian loafer, und I'll somevheres go vhere dose names you've been makin' oud vill get you vhat you deserve."
"Whata you say?" Angel kept his hold upon his friend, but the reference to their recent occupation brought a glint of anger into his own eyes.
By way of beginning his reply, Hermann smilingly returned the knife to its owner, who seized it with a growl of malice.
"Neffer mind vhat I say den," he answered. "Vhat I say now is 'Goot-nighd.' You two get oud."
He raised his thick arm to point to the door, but in the manner of its raising there was another significance. For a moment Angel and Mirka met hotly his steady gaze. Then the bar-keeper raised carelessly his other hand: it held a stout bung-starter.
The two men, with a common impulse, turned and silently left the place.
Hermann was not afraid of them. He knew that his threat of betrayal had been idle, for the excellent reason that there was no quarter in which betrayal would be effective, and he told himself that, as soon as their anger and their drunkenness had in some measure subsided, the plotters would recognize this. So he whistled complacently as he polished the bright surface of the bar and did not hesitate, when he began at last to wash and put away the glasses, to turn his back to the swinging door of the saloon. The campaign was not one that was considered important and, personally, he cared but little about it or what enmities it might awaken.
The campaigners cared, however, a great deal. There was in no sane mind any question of the result, but so mighty is custom that there were few sane minds that did not publicly pretend to be in doubt upon the issue.
For many days previously, any outsider, reading the newspapers or attending the mass-meetings in Cooper Union and Carnegie Hall, would have supposed that a prodigious battle was waging and that the result would be, until the last shot, in doubt. There were terrible scareheads, brutal cartoons, and extra editions. As the real problem was whether one organization of needy men should remain in control, or whether another should replace it, there were few matters of policy to be discussed; and so the speechmaking and the printing resolved themselves into personal investigations, and attacks upon character. Private defectives were hired, records searched, neighbors questioned, old enemies sought out, and family feuds revived. Desks were broken open, letters bought, anonymous communications mailed, boyhood indiscretions unearthed, and women and men hired to wheedle, to commit perjury, to entrap. Whatever was discovered, forged, stolen, manufactured—whatever truth or falsehood could be seized by whatever means—was blazoned in the papers, shrieked by the newsboys, bawled from the cart-tails at the corners under the campaign banners, in the light of the torches and before the cheering crowds. It would all be over in a very short while; in a very short while there would pass one another, with pleasant smiles, in court, at church, and along Broadway, the distinguished gentlemen that were now, before big audiences, calling one another adulterers and thieves; but it is customary for distinguished gentlemen so to call one another during a manly campaign in this successful democracy of ours, and it seems to be an engrossing occupation while the chance endures.
Though he often trembled, Wesley Dyker, perhaps because his records of any sort were as yet but brief, escaped with a fairly clean skin this Yahoo discharge, but the downpour continued all about him with tremendous vigor and at tremendous cost. The Republican leaders, fully expecting defeat, assessed their supporters just as heavily as if they were certain to triumph, spent much time and more money and no end of breath. The Reformers, under varying factional names, bewildered, sometimes advisedly, the independent voter by here joining one leading party, there endorsing another, and in a third place clamoring for a ballot so split and so subdivided that the average man could in no wise comprehend it when marked. The Socialists, to be sure, went along calmly enough, confessing their numerical weakness and securely seeing in the small increase of the present day the promise of the large majority of the distant morrow. But all the while the Democratic organization thundered an inch forward in the light and ran a mile forward in the darkness by precisely the same powers as were invoked, with so much smaller results, by the Republicans and the Reformers.
Not that there was any reason to doubt the organization's victory. There was none. But every organization always insists that, no matter how easy the skirmish, its leaders must so manage that it comes out of the fray to all appearances stronger than it came out of the fray preceding. Each majority must be larger than the last, and so the lists are padded, and the repeaters imported, and the lodging-houses colonized, and the organization, like the frog in La Fontaine's fable, though with less reason, swells and swells against the hour when it shall finally burst. The saloons were crowded; it was freely predicted that, the season being prosperous, votes would go at no lower than two dollars, and, in some quarters and some instances, as high as five dollars apiece.
There were some points, however, to which the tide of prosperity had not risen, and one of these was the high tenement of Katie Flanagan. The Irish girl returned there every night a little more discouraged than when she had left its precarious shelter in the morning, as doubtful as ever of Hermann's ability to support a wife, but more doubtful than ever of her own ability to help, should they marry, in the support of the home. At the shop, the work and the hours weighed more and more heavily upon her; they dragged at the heels of her mind when she endeavored to evade the insulting compliments of the callow youths and gray men that strolled by her counter, and they were impedimenta that made it daily more difficult to escape without offense the oily approaches of the dignified Mr. Porter.
"Sometimes," she said one evening, as she and Carrie sat over their meager supper, "I begin wonderin' again whether it's worth while runnin' away."
The striking shirtwaist-maker, who had spent a long day on picket-duty before a Waverley Place factory, looked up with round eyes calmly serious.
"That is what I am wondering all the time," she replied.
Katie made an impatient movement of her hand.
"Och, now," she generously protested, "it's all right for me to growl, because I've got a job. I don't count, an' it's just me habit. But you mustn't do it, me dear."
"I am not complaining; I am just honestly wondering, that's all."
"But if the worst came, you could go back to work, you know."
Carrie's face was all surprise.
"And turn traitor to my friends striking in my own and all the other factories?" she asked. "Oh, no; you would be the last to do it yourself, Katie. I would rather go on the street."
"You don't mean that, darlin'."
"I do mean it. If I went on the street, I would hurt myself, but if I did the other thing I would hurt all the other girls in the union."
She spoke quietly, but with infinite conviction, and Katie knew the forces that had brought about this state of mind. The widespread strike, though it still continued, was a failure. Public sentiment had never been aroused; the employers had succeeded in securing non-union labor, whose wages they were, even now, securely reducing, and whose privileges—granted to entice them to work—they were curbing; their political powers earned them the armed assistance of the law; and the strikers' ranks, though but little thinned by desertion, were steadily decreased by poverty, by the necessity of the girls to find other sorts of work, by illness, and, now that the cold autumn had set in, by death. Carrie was underfed, scantily clothed, penniless, and Katie, remembering these things, found herself without reply.
Had she needed further example of the pressure of conditions upon her kind, she could have found it in an incident in the shop on the day following. A bull-necked young man, with ruddy cheeks and a certainty of manner that spoke as loudly in his eyes and his scarf-pin as in his voice, sauntered up to the silk-stocking counter, where she happened then to be stationed, and began turning over the wares displayed.
"Have you been waited on?" inquired Katie.
"No," said the young man, looking at her steadily; "but I'd like you to wait on me. Are you busy?"
Katie said nothing, but stood there. The young man said nothing. Katie began to finger the boxes before her, but she felt that the young man was looking only at her.
"What quality would you like me to show you?" she asked.
"Well," parried the customer, "what quality do you like?"
She shot one glance at him: he was still looking at her.
"We have only the best at this counter," she answered, with a slight flush. "You'll be findin' the cheaper the sixth aisle to your right."
But the young man only laughed with unconcern, and continued to keep his gaze on her lowered Irish blue eyes.
"I can afford the best of everything," he said.
There was a pause. Katie raised her eyes and met his own without flinching. He smiled, but he was quite too satisfied with his own charms to notice that the salesgirl was not smiling.
"What time do you quit work?" he inquired.
"I never quit."
She said this as if she were closing a door, but the young man proceeded imperturbably to rattle at the knob.
"I thought," he said, "that you might like to eat a little dinner over at the 'York' with me this evening."
"Thanks," the girl answered, "but I do all me eatin' with me husband.—Will you, please, be tellin' me what sort of stockin's you want?"
The young man grinned. He seemed to enjoy what he took to be her playful repartee.
"Look here," he replied, "my wife is away back home, and I'm all alone over at that hotel."
He was leaning airily toward her, both hands on the counter. Katie, standing opposite, leaned toward him. She answered his smile, but he could not see that her smile was not of his own sort.
"Do you want to buy anything?" she demanded.
"Yes," said the customer, meeting her gaze again. "Will you sell?"
It was no unusual incident, no more unusual than the coming incident of Mirka's attack upon Hermann, but the girl had reached the end of her endurance, and what followed across that counter was not unlike what was to occur across Ludwig Schleger's bar. Katie opened her firm, pink palm and smacked the young bargain-seeker smartly across the mouth.
There was no immediate consequence. The aisle was too crowded to allow any but the nearest employees to witness the blow, and the crowd was too intent upon its own thousand errands to heed what happened before its eyes. One or two salesgirls stood still at their work, petrified by alarm. One or two customers hesitated and chuckled. And then, as the young man with a face of crimson shouldered his way into a hurried oblivion from which he never reappeared, the rush of business sent the clerks whirling about their own tasks and sent the crowd hurrying about its own purposes.
But Katie knew that more would follow, and that what would follow would be an interview with Mr. Porter. The shop's system of surveillance missed nothing, and within a half-hour the girl was standing in the dark office where she had first been hired.
In his likeness to a Sunday-school superintendent Mr. Porter was shocked and grieved to hear that any young lady in the Lennox store would strike a purchaser. In his likeness to a surgeon he promptly declared that there ought to be no issue short of expulsion. And in his own hidden character—deep in his own abominable character—he was wondering whether he could not turn this incident to the advantage that he had so long sought.
"The viper was insultin' me," said Katie.
"Are you quite sure of that, Miss Flanagan?"
"Sure I'm sure. Do you have to wait for a snake to bite you before you know what he's up to?"
"You could have called the floor-walker."
"And been fined for me pains, Mr. Porter."
Mr. Porter tapped his desk and kept his eyes on his fingers.
"I find," he said slowly, "that most men do not make approaches without some encouragement, in either word or manner, on the part of the girl. I also find that such occurrences as this are very rare in the experience of most of the girls in our employ."
He stopped, but Katie stood silent by the arm of the desk, her lips compressed, a frown between her arched black brows. He sent a crooked glance up at her, and then resumed:
"I scarcely ever have a case of this sort to deal with. I wonder why, if such things are done by customers, the other girls do not report them."
He stopped again, and this time Katie answered:
"I suppose they boss their own lives in their own way, Mr. Porter."
A faint spark of color shone in Mr. Porter's white cheek.
"I suppose they do," he answered, gently pulling at his side-whiskers, and peeping at his victim over the caressing hand. "In fact, between you and me, Miss Flanagan, I am told that some of them do that so well that they are practically independent of their wages in this store."
Again Katie failed to respond.
"Do you understand me, Miss Flanagan?"
Katie thought of her desperate days before she had found her present employment. She thought of Hermann and what seemed to be the sole chance of rising to a salary where marriage could be a practical possibility. She thought of Carrie's plight and of Carrie's dependence upon her.
"I do that, Mr. Porter," she answered.
He looked up squarely then, and she even managed to torture her face into an expression of roguery.
"Ah," said Mr. Porter, smiling a paternal smile. He reached out and patted her hand, and, though her soul revolted, she managed to keep her hand passive. "Now, my dear young lady, you are at last coming to your senses. You mustn't take life so seriously."
"I'll try not to, Mr. Porter."
"That's right; that's right. I ought to discharge you, I know. It may be difficult not to discharge you. But I will do this much: I will suspend judgment for a few days."
He looked at her fixedly. Her cold lips formed another phrase of thanks.
"And in the meantime," he continued, "you let me know of some evening when you can come out to a quiet corner where we can have supper together, and where we won't be wasting the firm's time. Then we'll talk this whole thing over, and I'll see what I can do."
The eyes of neither wavered.
"Thank you, Mr. Porter," said Katie again.
With that she left him, but she went away with the knowledge that her game of hide-and-seek was almost ended. Just when it would end was beyond all guessing, but that it would end soon and that it would end in her defiance of her superiors and her prompt expulsion seemed altogether certain. She reflected that the small delay which she had gained would profit but lightly those in whose interests she had attempted to truckle and palliate, and, when, that night, she told her experience to Carrie, her words fell upon ears that read into them a portentous meaning.
The homely, brown-haired Lithuanian, whose cheeks were less round now than they had been, and whose hair that needed no covering in the summer, was still uncovered, went to her weary picket-duty in Waverley Place the next morning—the morning, as it happened, that preceded Hermann's little brush with Mirka—with a slow step and a heavy heart. She knew the futility of the work she was performing; she saw it even in the relaxed vigilance of the policemen on the corners and in the mocking grins of the girls and toughs at the gloomy factory-door. All day as, sometimes companioned and sometimes alone, she plodded her eventless round, the irony of the task bit into her soul. Something she must do, and soon. Already she was deep in Katie's debt, and Katie was near dismissal.