er inarticulate pitiful voice the tears
added luster to her eyes as her emotions welled up within her.

The machines began to roar and vibrate again. The noon recess was over.
She went back to her job. Her broad, heavy hands began once more to
serve a company on whose moderate remuneration she depended for her
daily bread. Her silhouette against the window where she stood was no
longer an object for my vain eyes to look upon with a sense of
superiority. I could hear the melancholy intonation of her voice,
pronouncing words of courage over her disfigured underlip. She was one
of nature's failures--one of God's triumphs.

Saturday night my fellow lodger, Miss Arnold, and I made an expedition
to the spring opening of a large dry-goods shop in the neighbourhood of
Mrs. Brown's. I felt rather humble in my toil-worn clothes to accompany
the young woman, who had an appearance of prosperity which borrowed
money alone can give. But she encouraged me, and we started together for
the principal street of the quarter whose history was told in its
show-case windows. Pawnshops and undertakers, bakeries and soda-water
fountains were ranged side by side on this highway, as the necessity for
them is ranged with incongruous proximity in the existence of those who
live pell-mell in moral and material disorder after the manner of the
poor. There was even a wedding coach in the back of the corner
undertaker's establishment, and in the front window a coffin, small and
white, as though death itself were more attractive in the young, as
though the little people of the quarter were nearer Heaven and more
suggestive of angels than their life-worn elders. The spotless tiny
coffin with its fringe and satin tufting had its share of the ideal,
mysterious, unused and costly; in the same store with the wedding coach,
it suggested festivity: a reunion to celebrate with tears a small
pilgrim's right to sleep at last undisturbed.

The silver rays of the street lamps mingled with the yellow light of
the shop windows, and on the sidewalk there was a cosmopolitan public.
Groups of Italian women crooned to each other in their soft voices over
the bargains for babies displayed at the spring opening; factory girls
compared notes, chattered, calculated, tried to resist, and ended by an
extravagant choice; the German women looked and priced and bought
nothing; the Hungarians had evidently spent their money on arriving.
From the store window wax figures of the i