the direction
where I once lived--as said people have concerning them, to whom, as
a rule, they also refer in much the same manner and with the same
words. With each group on either side of its separating gulf the
conviction is firm that little is to be hoped for or expected from
the other, and common qualities are forgotten in the realization of
distinctive differences.

"What's the most you ever made a week?" The girl who asked the
question moved up for me to sit on the bench beside her, and,
unwrapping a newspaper parcel, took from it a large cucumber pickle,
a piece of cheese, a couple of biscuits, and half of a cocoanut pie,
and laid them on a table in front of her. "Help yourself." She
pushed the paper serving as tray and cloth toward me. "I ain't had
much appetite lately. Hello, Mamie! Come over here and sit on our
bench. What you got good for lunch? My stomach's turned back on
pie. I'd give ten cents for a cup of coffee."

"Everywhere else but this old hothouse sells it for two cents a cup
without, and three cents with." The girl called Mamie nodded to me
and took her seat on the bench. "I don't like milk nohow, and I'd
give the money glad for something hot in the middle of the day.
Don't nothing do your insides as much good as something piping hot.
Say--I saw Barker last night." Her voice lowered but little. "He
and I are going to see 'Some Girl' at the Bijou next week. It's all
make-up--his being sweet on Ceeley Bayne! That knock-kneed,
slew-footed, pop-eyed Gracie Jones got that off. I'm going to get
one them lace-and-chiffon waists at Plum's for $2.98 if don't nobody
get sick and need medicine between now and Wednesday. Seems like
somebody's always sick at our house."

The question asked me had been forgotten, and, glad to escape the
acknowledgment that I had never earned a dollar in my life, I got up
on the plea that I must see a girl at the other end of the room, and
walked across it. As I went I scanned each face I saw. Consciously
or subconsciously I had been hoping for days that I would see a face
which ever haunts me, a face I wanted to forget and could not forget.
Everywhere I go, in factories or mills or shops or homes; in the
streets, and at my windows, I am always wondering if I shall see her.
She was very unhappy. Who is she? Why was Selwyn with her? It is
my last thought at night, my first in the morning.

Yesterday I was at the box-factory where Jimmy Gibbons works. It