counted exactly seven
different kinds of dirt-colour!" It was Josefa who was using her tongue;
she had had practice at a milliner's.

"He'll have to take care of the oil!" tittered one.

"He's awfully handsome! Look what a grand forehead! Oh, what a lovely
red silk handkerchief in his breast-pocket!" whispered Kristofa to
Silla.

The row squeezed themselves up against the fence. The person in question
came by humming carelessly, with his head held high and swinging his
walking-stick. All the young girls stared respectfully and stupidly
straight in front of them, though not without a glance out of the corner
of their eye. He disappeared up the stream, cleaving it like a salmon.

"He parts his hair at the back of his head!"--"His hat is like a
pudding-basin!"--"Don't breathe upon him, he is so thin!"--"He is his
own father's son!"--"Oh, what a conceited stick!"

They had turned to look after him.

"He isn't nearly so stern as he walks there; but in the factory, you
know, he has to be as firm as a rock. Johanna Sjoberg, who does clear
starching, recognised him down at the masked ball at the fair; she told
me so herself."

"You can just fancy," struck in Jakobina, "what a number of fine people
come to the rooms in that way. You think you are only waltzing with a
common man, and perhaps it is the son of the richest man in the town!
But if you are a little careful you can easily tell by the way they
dance, or by their watch, or their shirt-collar, or because they chew
such fine tobacco."

"He looked at us, did you notice?" whispered Kristofa eagerly into
Silla's ear.

"Yes, because he knows me," said Silla, a little confused at his having
fixed his eyes on her.

There was a burst of laughter.

"Is that young crow going to caw too?"

The young crow grew hot beneath her handkerchief, but she did not
answer. She knew quite well, that he did know her; he had been in the
office when she went out with her mother to the Consul-General's to
apply for a place in the factory.

A stream of girls from another factory fell like a tributary into
theirs, and then through ramifications of streets and lanes, the whole
flowed out into the irregular part of the town that was built of wood,
below--through narrow entrances and up narrow flights of steps, into
brown, red, white or grey houses, houses with slate roofs, with turf
roofs, with tile roofs, and new houses that had barely been roofed.

Silla slipped into a narrow, dam