t them. Too hot to wear many clothes,
yet hating the disorder of a flimsy negligee, she panted by a window,
while the venomous sun glared on tin roofs, and a few feet away
snarled the ceaseless trrrrrr of a steam-riveter that was erecting new
flats to shut off their view of the Hudson. In the lava-paved back
yard was the insistent filelike voice of the janitor's son, who kept
piping: "Haaay, Bil-lay, hey; Billy's got a girl! Hey, Billy's got a
girl! Haaay, Bil-lay!" She imagined herself going down and
slaughtering him; vividly saw herself waiting for the elevator,
venturing into the hot sepulcher of the back areaway, and there
becoming too languid to complete the task of ridding the world of the
dear child. She was horrified to discover what she had been imagining,
and presently imagined it all over again.

Two blocks across from her, seen through the rising walls of the new
apartment-houses, were the drab windows of a group of run-down
tenements, which broke the sleek respectability of the well-to-do
quarter. In those windows Ruth observed foreign-looking, idle women,
not very clean, who had nothing to do after they had completed half an
hour of slovenly housework in the morning. They watched their
neighbors breathlessly. They peered out with the petty virulent
curiosity of the workless at whatever passed in the streets below
them. Fifty times a day they could be seen to lean far out on their
fire-escapes and follow with slowly craning necks and unblinking eyes
the passing of something--ice-wagons, undertakers' wagons, ole-clo'
men, Ruth surmised. The rest of the time, ragged-haired and greasy of
wrapper, gum-chewing and yawning, they rested their unlovely stomachs
on discolored sofa-cushions on the window-sills and waited for
something to appear. Two blocks away they were--yet to Ruth they
seemed to be in the room with her, claiming her as one of their
sisterhood. For now she was a useless woman, as they were. She raged
with the thought that she might grow to be like them in every
respect--she, Ruth Winslow!... She wondered if any of them were
Norwegians named Ericson.... With the fascination of dread she watched
them as closely as they watched the world with the hypnotization of
unspeakable hopelessness.... She had to find her work, something for
which the world needed her, lest she be left here, useless and
unhappy in a flat. In her kitchen she was merely an intruder on the
efficient maid, and there was no nursery.