foot-warmer I call her; that's Angela there, wid eyes
that go through you an' the life beaten out of her by the man that
called himself her father, an' wasn't at all, at all. It's she that does
the kaping of the house, an' sleeps across the foot, an' it's mine they
think the two av 'em, else they'd never a let me in, the rules bein',
'no lodgers.' It's not lodgers they are. It's me boarders, full fledged,
an' who's a better right than me, though I'd not be sayin' so to the
housekeeper that'd need forty pair o' eyes to her two to see what's
goin' on under her nose."

The "foot-warmer's" office had ceased for one of them before the month
ended, and when the Potter's Field had received the pine coffin followed
only by the two watchers, the widow made haste to bring in another
candidate for the same position; one upon whom she had kept her eye for
a month, certain that worse trouble was on the way than loss of work.

"There was the look on her that manes but the one thing," she said
afterward. "There's thim that sthand everything an' niver a word, an'
there's thim that turns disperate. She was a disperate wan."

Never had a "disperate wan" better reason. A factory girl almost from
babyhood, her apprenticeship having begun at seven, she had left the
mill at fourteen, a tall girl older than her years in look and
experience. New York was her Mecca, and to New York she came, with a
week's wages in her pocket on which to live till work should be found,
and neither relative nor friend save a girl who had preceded her by a
few months and was now at work in a fringe and gimp factory, earning
seven dollars a week and promising the same to the child after a few
weeks' training. But seven years in a cotton-mill, if they had given
quickness in one direction, had blunted all power in others. The fingers
were unskilful and clumsy and her mind too wandering and inattentive to
master details, and the place was quickly lost. She entered her name as
candidate for the first vacancy in a Grand Street store, and in the mean
time went into a coffee and spice mill and became coffee-picker at
three dollars a week. This lasted a month or two, but even here there
was dissatisfaction with lack of thoroughness, and she was presently
discharged. The vacancy had come, and she went at once into the store,
her delicate face and pretty eyes commending her to the manager, who
lost no time in telling her what impression she could produce if she
were bette