An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser [141]
After she had worked a little while, he went to her side and watched her as she picked up and stamped the collars piled beside her and threw them to one side. Also the speed and accuracy with which she did it. Then, because for a second she turned and looked at him, giving him an innocent and yet cheerful and courageous smile, he smiled back, most pleased.
“Well, I guess you’ll make out all right,” he ventured to say, since he could not help feeling that she would. And instantly, for a second only, she turned and smiled again. And Clyde, in spite of himself, was quite thrilled. He liked her on the instant, but because of his own station here, of course, as he now decided, as well as his promise to Gilbert, he must be careful about being congenial with any of the help in this room—even as charming a girl as this. It would not do. He had been guarding himself in connection with the others and must with her too, a thing which seemed a little strange to him then, for he was very much drawn to her. She was so pretty and cute. Yet she was a working girl, as he remembered now, too—a factory girl, as Gilbert would say, and he was her superior. But she WAS so pretty and cute.
Instantly he went on to others who had been put on this same day, and finally coming to Miss Todd asked her to report pretty soon on how Miss Alden was getting along—that he wanted to know.
But at the same time that he had addressed Roberta, and she had smiled back at him, Ruza Nikoforitch, who was working two tables away, nudged the girl working next her, and without any one noting it, first winked, then indicated with a slight movement of the head both Clyde and Roberta. Her friend was to watch them. And after Clyde had gone away and Roberta was working as before, she leaned over and whispered: “He says she’ll do already.” Then she lifted her eyebrows and compressed her lips. And her friend replied, so softly that no one could hear her: “Pretty quick, eh? And he didn’t seem to see any one else at all before.”
Then the twain smiled most wisely, a choice bit between them. Ruza Nikoforitch was jealous.
Chapter 13
The reasons why a girl of Roberta’s type should be seeking employment with Griffiths and Company at this time and in this capacity are of some point. For, somewhat after the fashion of Clyde in relation to his family and his life, she too considered her life a great disappointment. She was the daughter of Titus Alden, a farmer—of near Biltz, a small town in Mimico County, some fifty miles north. And from her youth up she had seen little but poverty. Her father—the youngest of three sons of Ephraim Alden, a farmer in this region before him—was so unsuccessful that at forty-eight he was still living in a house which, though old and much in need of repair at the time his father willed it to him, was now bordering upon a state of dilapidation. The house itself, while primarily a charming example of that excellent taste which produced those delightful gabled homes which embellish the average New England town and street, had been by now so reduced for want of paint, shingles, and certain flags which had once made a winding walk from a road gate to the front door, that it presented a decidedly melancholy aspect to the world, as though it might be coughing and saying: “Well, things are none too satisfactory with me.”
The interior of the house corresponded with the exterior. The floor boards and stair boards were loose and creaked most eerily at times. Some of the windows had