If a man
approached her, he would calculate upon getting her very cheap
because a girl in such a costume could not have been in the
habit of receiving any great sum. And if she went with him, he
would treat her with far less consideration than if she had
been about the same business in smarter attire. She spread the
dress on bureau and chair, smoothing it, wiping the mud stains
from it. She washed out her stockings at the stationary stand,
got them as dry as her remarkably strong hands could wring
them, hung them on a rung of the chair near the hot little
radiator. She cleaned her boots and overshoes with an old
newspaper she found in a drawer, and wet at the washstand. She
took her hat to pieces and made it over into something that
looked almost fresh enough to be new. Then, ready for bed, she
got the office of the hotel on the telephone and left a call
for half-past nine o'clock--three hours and a half away. When
she was throwing up the window, she glanced into the street.
The rain had once more ceased. Through the gray dimness the
men and women, boys and girls, on the way to the factories and
shops for the day's work, were streaming past in funereal
procession. Some of the young ones were lively. But the mass
was sullen and dreary. Bodies wrecked or rapidly wrecking by
ignorance of hygiene, by the foul air and foul food of the
tenements, by the monotonous toil of factory and shop--mindless
toil--toil that took away mind and put in its place a distaste
for all improvement--toil of the factories that distorted the
body and enveloped the soul in sodden stupidity--toil of the
shops that meant breathing bad air all day long, meant stooped
shoulders and varicose veins in the legs and the arches of the
insteps broken down, meant dull eyes, bad skin, female
complaints, meant the breeding of desires for the luxury the
shops display, the breeding of envy and servility toward those
able to buy these luxuries.
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