"dat wasn't in it."

"Ah, what deh hell?" urged Pete.

The girl retreated nervously.

"Ah, what deh hell?" repeated he.

Maggie darted into the hall, and up the stairs. She turned and smiled
at him, then disappeared.

Pete walked slowly down the street. He had something of an astonished
expression upon his features. He paused under a lamp-post and breathed
a low breath of surprise.

"Gawd," he said, "I wonner if I've been played fer a duffer."

Chapter VIII

As thoughts of Pete came to Maggie's mind, she began to have an intense
dislike for all of her dresses.

"What deh hell ails yeh? What makes yeh be allus fixin' and fussin'?
Good Gawd," her mother would frequently roar at her.

She began to note, with more interest, the well-dressed women she met
on the avenues. She envied elegance and soft palms. She craved those
adornments of person which she saw every day on the street, conceiving
them to be allies of vast importance to women.

Studying faces, she thought many of the women and girls she chanced to
meet, smiled with serenity as though forever cherished and watched over
by those they loved.

The air in the collar and cuff establishment strangled her. She knew
she was gradually and surely shrivelling in the hot, stuffy room. The
begrimed windows rattled incessantly from the passing of elevated
trains. The place was filled with a whirl of noises and odors.

She wondered as she regarded some of the grizzled women in the room,
mere mechanical contrivances sewing seams and grinding out, with heads
bended over their work, tales of imagined or real girlhood happiness,
past drunks, the baby at home, and unpaid wages. She speculated how
long her youth would endure. She began to see the bloom upon her
cheeks as valuable.

She imagined herself, in an exasperating future, as a scrawny woman
with an eternal grievance. Too, she thought Pete to be a very
fastidious person concerning the appearance of women.

She felt she would love to see somebody entangle their fingers in the
oily beard of the fat foreigner who owned the establishment. He was a
detestable creature. He wore white socks with low shoes. When he
tired of this amusement he would go to the mummies and moralize over
them.

Usually he submitted with silent dignity to all which he had to go
through, but, at times, he was goaded into comment.

"What deh hell," he demanded once. "Look at all dese little jugs!
Hundred jugs in a ro