Chapter 13: Eight to Six

Through that long, wet spring Nance did her ten hours a day, six days in the week and on the seventh washed her clothes and mended them. Her breaking in was a hard one, for she was as quick of tongue as she was of fingers, and her tirades against the monotony, the high speed, and the small pay were frequent and vehement. Every other week when Dan was on the night shift, she made up her mind definitely that she would stand it no longer.

But on the alternate weeks when she never failed to find him waiting at the gas-pipe to take her home, she thought better of it. She loved to slip in under his big cotton umbrella, when the nights were rainy, and hold to his elbow as he shouldered a way for her through the crowd; she liked to be a part of that endless procession of bobbing umbrellas that flowed down the long, wet, glistening street; best of all she liked the distinction of having a “steady” and the envious glances it brought her from the other girls.

Sometimes when they paused at a shop window, she caught her reflection in a mirror, and smiled approval at the bright face under the red tam. She wondered constantly if Dan thought she was pretty and always came to the conclusion that he did not.

From the time they left the factory until they saw the towering bulk of the cathedral against the dusk, Nance’s chatter never ceased. She dramatized her experiences at the factory; she gave a lively account of the doings of the Snawdor family; she wove tales of mystery around old Mr. Demry. She had the rare gift of enhancing every passing moment with something of importance and interest.

Dan listened with the flattering homage a slow, taciturn nature often pays a quick, vivacious one. It was only when problems concerning the factory were touched upon that his tongue lost its stiffness. Under an unswerving loyalty to his employers was growing a discontent with certain existing conditions. The bad lighting system, the lack of ventilation, the employment of children under age, were subjects that rendered him eloquent. That cruel month spent in the reformatory had branded him so deeply that he was supersensitive to the wrongs of others, and spent much of his time in planning ways and means to better conditions.

“Don’t you ever want a good time, Dan?” Nance asked. “Don’t you ever want to sort of let go and do something reckless?”

“No; but I’ll tell you what I do want. I want a’ education. I’ve a good mind to go to night school and try to pick up some of the things I didn’t get a chance to learn when I was a kid.”

Nance scoffed the idea; school was almost invisible to her from the giddy height of sixteen. “Let’s go on a bat,” she urged. “Let’s go out and see something.”

So on the four following Sundays Dan took her to see the library, the reservoir, the city hall, and the jail. His ideas of recreation had not been cultivated.

The time in the week to which she always looked forward was Saturday afternoon. Then they got out early, and if the weather was fine, they would stop in Post-Office Square and, sitting on one of the iron benches, watch the passing throng. There was something thrilling in the jostling crowds, and the electric signs flashing out one by one down the long gay thoroughfare.

Post-Office Square, at the end of the day, was always littered with papers and trash. In its center was a battered, weather kiosk, and facing it, was a huge electric advertisement which indulged in the glittering generality, that “You get what you pay for.”

It was not a place to inspire romance, yet every Saturday its benches were crowded with boys and girls who had no place to visit except on the street.

Through the long spring dusks, with their tender skies and silver stars, Nance and Dan kept company, unconcerned with the past or the future, wholly content with the May-time of the present. At a word or touch from Dan, Nance’s inflammable nature would have taken fire but Dan, under Mrs. Purdy’s influence, was passing through an acute stage of religious conversion, and all desires of the flesh were sternly repressed by that new creed to which he was making such heroic efforts to conform. With the zeal of a new convert, he considered it his duty to guard his small companion against all love-making, including his own.