________________________________________________
_ The end of it was that, after anxious enquiry and much
deliberation, Mrs. Fisher and Gerty, for once oddly united in
their effort to help their friend, decided on placing her in the
work-room of Mme. Regina's renowned millinery establishment. Even
this arrangement was not effected without considerable
negotiation, for Mme. Regina had a strong prejudice against
untrained assistance, and was induced to yield only by the fact
that she owed the patronage of Mrs. Bry and Mrs. Gormer to Carry
Fisher's influence. She had been willing from the first to employ
Lily in the show-room: as a displayer of hats, a fashionable
beauty might be a valuable asset. But to this suggestion Miss
Bart opposed a negative which Gerty emphatically supported, while
Mrs. Fisher, inwardly unconvinced, but resigned to this latest
proof of Lily's unreason, agreed that perhaps in the end it would
be more useful that she should learn the trade. To Regina's
work-room Lily was therefore committed by her friends, and there
Mrs. Fisher left her with a sigh of relief, while Gerty's
watchfulness continued to hover over her at a distance.
Lily had taken up her work early in January: it was now two
months later, and she was still being rebuked for her inability
to sew spangles on a hat-frame. As she returned to her work she
heard a titter pass down the tables. She knew she was an object
of criticism and amusement to the other work-women. They were,
of course, aware of her history--the exact situation of
every girl in the room was known and freely discussed by all the
others--but the knowledge did not produce in them any awkward
sense of class distinction: it merely explained why her untutored
fingers were still blundering over the rudiments of the trade.
Lily had no desire that they should recognize any social
difference in her; but she had hoped to be received as their
equal, and perhaps before long to show herself their superior by
a special deftness of touch, and it was humiliating to find that,
after two months of drudgery, she still betrayed her lack of
early training. Remote was the day when she might aspire to
exercise the talents she felt confident of possessing; only
experienced workers were entrusted with the delicate art of
shaping and trimming the hat, and the forewoman still held her
inexorably to the routine of preparatory work.
She began to rip the spangles from the frame, listening absently
to the buzz of talk which rose and fell with the coming and going
of Miss Haines's active figure. The air was closer than usual,
because Miss Haines, who had a cold, had not allowed a window to
be opened even during the noon recess; and Lily's head was so
heavy with the weight of a sleepless night that the chatter of
her companions had the incoherence of a dream.
"I TOLD her he'd never look at her again; and he didn't. I
wouldn't have, either--I think she acted real mean to him. He
took her to the Arion Ball, and had a hack for her both ways....
She's taken ten bottles, and her headaches don't seem no
better--but she's written a testimonial to say the first bottle
cured her, and she got five dollars and her picture in the
paper.... Mrs. Trenor's hat? The one with the green Paradise?
Here, Miss Haines--it'll be ready right off.... That was one of
the Trenor girls here yesterday with Mrs. George Dorset. How'd I
know? Why, Madam sent for me to alter the flower in that Virot
hat--the blue tulle: she's tall and slight, with her hair fuzzed
out--a good deal like Mamie Leach, on'y thinner...."
On and on it flowed, a current of meaningless sound, on which,
startlingly enough, a familiar name now and then floated to the
surface. It was the strangest part of Lily's strange experience,
the hearing of these names, the seeing the fragmentary
and distorted image of the world she had lived in reflected in
the mirror of the working-girls' minds. She had never before
suspected the mixture of insatiable curiosity and contemptuous
freedom with which she and her kind were discussed in this
underworld of toilers who lived on their vanity and
self-indulgence. Every girl in Mme. Regina's work-room knew to
whom the headgear in her hands was destined, and had her opinion
of its future wearer, and a definite knowledge of the latter's
place in the social system. That Lily was a star fallen from that
sky did not, after the first stir of curiosity had subsided,
materially add to their interest in her. She had fallen, she had
"gone under," and true to the ideal of their race, they were awed
only by success--by the gross tangible image of material
achievement. The consciousness of her different point of view
merely kept them at a little distance from her, as though she
were a foreigner with whom it was an effort to talk.
"Miss Bart, if you can't sew those spangles on more regular I
guess you'd better give the hat to Miss Kilroy."
Lily looked down ruefully at her handiwork. The forewoman was
right: the sewing on of the spangles was inexcusably bad. What
made her so much more clumsy than usual? Was it a growing
distaste for her task, or actual physical disability? She felt
tired and confused: it was an effort to put her thoughts
together. She rose and handed the hat to Miss Kilroy, who took it
with a suppressed smile.
"I'm sorry; I'm afraid I am not well," she said to the forewoman.
Miss Haines offered no comment. From the first she had augured
ill of Mme. Regina's consenting to include a fashionable
apprentice among her workers. In that temple of art no raw
beginners were wanted, and Miss Haines would have been more than
human had she not taken a certain pleasure in seeing her
forebodings confirmed.
"You'd better go back to binding edges," she said drily. Lily
slipped out last among the band of liberated work-women. She did
not care to be mingled in their noisy dispersal: once in the
street, she always felt an irresistible return to her old
standpoint, an instinctive shrinking from all that was unpolished
and promiscuous. In the days--how distant they now
seemed!--when she had visited the Girls' Club with Gerty Farish,
she had felt an enlightened interest in the working-classes; but
that was because she looked down on them from above, from the
happy altitude of her grace and her beneficence. Now that she was
on a level with them, the point of view was less interesting.
She felt a touch on her arm, and met the penitent eye of Miss
Kilroy. "Miss Bart, I guess you can sew those spangles on as well
as I can when you're feeling right. Miss Haines didn't act fair
to you."
Lily's colour rose at the unexpected advance: it was a long time
since real kindness had looked at her from any eyes but Gerty's.
"Oh, thank you: I'm not particularly well, but Miss Haines was
right. I AM clumsy."
"Well, it's mean work for anybody with a headache." Miss Kilroy
paused irresolutely. "You ought to go right home and lay down.
Ever try orangeine?"
"Thank you." Lily held out her hand. "It's very kind of you--I
mean to go home."
She looked gratefully at Miss Kilroy, but neither knew what more
to say. Lily was aware that the other was on the point of
offering to go home with her, but she wanted to be alone and
silent--even kindness, the sort of kindness that Miss Kilroy
could give, would have jarred on her just then.
"Thank you," she repeated as she turned away.
She struck westward through the dreary March twilight, toward the
street where her boarding-house stood. She had resolutely refused
Gerty's offer of hospitality. Something of her mother's fierce
shrinking from observation and sympathy was beginning to develop
in her, and the promiscuity of small quarters and close intimacy
seemed, on the whole, less endurable than the solitude of a hall
bedroom in a house where she could come and go unremarked among
other workers. For a while she had been sustained by this desire
for privacy and independence; but now, perhaps from increasing
physical weariness, the lassitude brought about by hours of
unwonted confinement, she was beginning to feel acutely the
ugliness and discomfort of her surroundings. The day's task done,
she dreaded to return to her narrow room, with its
blotched wallpaper and shabby paint; and she hated every step of
the walk thither, through the degradation of a New York street in
the last stages of decline from fashion to commerce.
But what she dreaded most of all was having to pass the chemist's
at the corner of Sixth Avenue. She had meant to take another
street: she had usually done so of late. But today her steps were
irresistibly drawn toward the flaring plate-glass comer; she
tried to take the lower crossing, but a laden dray crowded her
back, and she struck across the street obliquely, reaching the
sidewalk just opposite the chemist's door. _
Read next: BOOK II: WEB PAGE 21
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