willing and possessed of so much hope and vigor that along with Liggett, who had first talked with her, he was at once taken with her. Distinctly she was above the average of the girls in this room. And he could not help wondering about her as he talked to her, for she seemed so tense, a little troubled as to the outcome of this interview, as though this was a very great adventure for her.
She explained that up to this time she had been living with her parents near a town called Biltz, but was now living with friends here. She talked so honestly and simply that Clyde was very much moved by her, and for this reason wished to help her. At the same time he wondered if she were not really above the type of work she was seeking. Her eyes were so round and blue and intelligent — her lips and nose and ears and hands so small and pleasing.
“You’re going to live in Lycurgus, then, if you can get work here?” he said, more to be talking to her than anything else.
“Yes,” she said, looking at him most directly and frankly.
“And the name again?” He took down a record pad.
“Roberta Alden.”
“And your address here?”
“228 Taylor Street.”
“I don’t even know where that is myself,” he informed her because he liked talking to her. “I haven’t been here so very long, you see.” He wondered just why afterwards he had chosen to tell her as much about himself so swiftly. Then he added: “I don’t know whether Mr. Liggett has told you all about the work here. But it’s piece work, you know, stamping collars. I’ll show you if you’ll just step over here,” and he led the way to a near-by table where the stampers were. After letting her observe how it was done, and without calling Miss Todd, he picked up one of the collars and proceeded to explain all that had been previously explained to him.
At the same time, because of the intentness with which she observed him and his gestures, the seriousness with which she appeared to take all that he said, he felt a little nervous and embarrassed. There was something quite searching and penetrating about her glance. After he had explained once more what the bundle rate was, and how much some made and how little others, and she had agreed that she would like to try, he called Miss Todd, who took her to the locker room to hang up her hat and coat. Then presently he saw her returning, a fluff of light hair about her forehead, her cheeks slightly flushed, her eyes very intent and serious. And as advised by Miss Todd, he saw her turn back her sleeves, revealing a pretty pair of forearms. Then she fell to, and by her gestures Clyde guessed that she would prove both speedy and accurate. For she seemed most anxious to obtain and keep this place.
After she had worked a little while, he went to her side and watched her as she picked up and stamped the collars piled beside her and threw them to one side. Also the speed and accuracy with which she did it. Then, because for a second she turned and looked at him, giving him an innocent and yet cheerful and courageous smile, he smiled back, most pleased.
“Well, I guess you’ll make out all right,” he ventured to say, since he could not help feeling that she would. And instantly, for a second only, she turned and smiled again. And Clyde, in spite of himself, was quite thrilled. He liked her on the instant, but because of his own station here, of course, as he now decided, as well as his promise to Gilbert, he must be careful about being congenial with any of the help in this room — even as charming a girl as this. It would not do. He had been guarding himself in connection with the others and must with her too, a thing which seemed a little strange to him then, for he was very much drawn to her. She was so pretty and cute. Yet she was a working girl, as he remembered now, too — a factory girl, as Gilbert would say, and he was her superior. But she WAS so pretty and cute.
Instantly he went on to others who had been put on this same day, and finally coming to Miss Todd asked her to report pretty soon on how Miss Alden was getting along — that he wanted to know.
But at the same time that he had addressed Roberta, and she had smiled back at him, Ruza Nikoforitch, who was working two tables away, nudged the girl working next her, and without any one noting it, first winked, then indicated with a slight movement of the head both Clyde and Roberta. Her friend was to watch them. And after Clyde had gone away and Roberta was working as before, she leaned over and whispered: “He says she’ll do already.” Then she lifted her eyebrows and compressed her lips. And her friend replied, so softly that no one could hear her: “Pretty quick, eh? And he didn’t seem to see any one else at all before.”
Then the twain smiled most wisely, a choice bit between them. Ruza Nikoforitch was jealous.
Chapter 13
The reasons why a girl of Roberta’s type should be seeking employment with Griffiths and Company at this time and in this capacity are of some point. For, somewhat after the fashion of Clyde in relation to his family and his life, she too considered her life a great disappointment. She was the daughter of Titus Alden, a farmer — of near Biltz, a small town in Mimico County, some fifty miles north. And from her youth up she had seen little but poverty. Her father — the youngest of three sons of Ephraim Alden, a farmer in this region before him — was so unsuccessful that at forty-eight he was still living in a house which, though old and much in need of repair at the time his father willed it to him, was now bordering upon a state of dilapidation. The house itself, while primarily a charming example of that excellent taste which produced those delightful gabled homes which embellish the average New England town and street, had been by now so reduced for want of paint, shingles, and certain flags which had once made a winding walk from a road gate to the front door, that it presented a decidedly melancholy aspect to the world, as though it might be coughing and saying: “Well, things are none too satisfactory with me.”
The interior of the house corresponded with the exterior. The floor boards and stair boards were loose and creaked most eerily at times. Some of the windows had shades — some did not. Furniture of both an earlier and a later date, but all in a somewhat decayed condition, intermingled and furnished it in some nondescript manner which need hardly be described.
As for the parents of Roberta, they were excellent examples of that native type of Americanism which resists facts and reveres illusion. Titus Alden was one of that vast company of individuals who are born, pass through and die out of the world without ever quite getting any one thing straight. They appear, blunder, and end in a fog. Like his two brothers, both older and almost as nebulous, Titus was a farmer solely because his father had been a farmer. And he was here on this farm because it had been willed to him and because it was easier to stay here and try to work this than it was to go elsewhere. He was a Republican because his father before him was a Republican and because this county was Republican. It never occurred to him to be otherwise. And, as in the case of his politics and his religion, he had borrowed all his notions of what was right and wrong from those about him. A single, serious, intelligent or rightly informing book had never been read by any member of this family — not one. But they were nevertheless excellent, as conventions, morals and religions go — honest, upright, God-fearing and respectable.
In so far as the daughter of these parents was concerned, and in the face of natural gifts which fitted her for something better than this world from which she derived, she was still, in part, at least, a reflection of the religious and moral notions there and then prevailing — the views of the local ministers and the laity in general. At the same time, because of a warm, imaginative, sensuous temperament, she was filled — once she reached fifteen and sixteen — with the world-old dream of all of Eve’s daughters from the homeliest to the fairest — that her beauty or charm might some day and ere long smite bewitchingly
