suspicious.
A thought will colour a world for us. The flow of Carrie's meditations
had been disturbed, and Hanson had not long gone upstairs before she
followed. She had realised with the lapse of the quarter hours that
Drouet was not coming, and somehow she felt a little resentful, a little
as if she had been forsaken--was not good enough. She went upstairs,
where everything was silent. Minnie was sewing by a lamp at the table.
Hanson had already turned in for the night. In her weariness and
disappointment Carrie did no more than announce that she was going to
bed.
"Yes, you'd better," returned Minnie. "You've got to get up early, you
know."
The morning was no better. Hanson was just going out the door as Carrie
came from her room. Minnie tried to talk with her during breakfast, but
there was not much of interest which they could mutually discuss. As on
the previous morning, Carrie walked down town, for she began to realise
now that her four-fifty would not even allow her car fare after she paid
her board. This seemed a miserable arrangement. But the morning light
swept away the first misgivings of the day, as morning light is ever
wont to do.
At the shoe factory she put in a long day, scarcely so wearisome as the
preceding, but considerably less novel. The head foreman, on his round,
stopped by her machine.
"Where did you come from?" he inquired.
"Mr. Brown hired me," she replied.
"Oh, he did, eh!" and then, "See that you keep things going."
The machine girls impressed her even less favourably. They seemed
satisfied with their lot, and were in a sense "common." Carrie had more
imagination than they. She was not used to slang. Her instinct in the
matter of dress was naturally better. She disliked to listen to the girl
next to her, who was rather hardened by experience.
"I'm going to quit this," she heard her remark to her neighbour. "What
with the stipend and being up late, it's too much for me health."
They were free with the fellows, young and old, about the place, and
exchanged banter in rude phrases, which at first shocked her. She saw
that she was taken to be of the same sort and addressed accordingly.
"Hello," remarked one of the stout-wristed sole-workers to her at noon.
"You're a daisy." He really expected to hear the common "Aw! go chase
yourself!" in return, and was sufficiently abashed, by Carrie's silently
moving away, to retreat, awkwardly grinning.
That night at the flat she was
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