“You gimme!”

She had snatched up her small hand-satchel from the divan and stood flashing now beside him, her small, blazing face only level with his cravat.

“What you spittin’ fire for?  That wa’n’t nothin’ I slipped in but my address, girl.  When you need me call on me.  ‘The Liberty, 96.’  Go right up in the elevator, no questions asked.  Get me?” he said, poking the small purse into the V of her jacket.  “Get me?”

“Oh, you—­Woh—­woh—­woh!”

With her face flung back and twisted, and dodging his outflung arm, she was down four flights of narrow, unused stairs and out.  Once in the streets, she walked with her face still thrust up and a frenzy of haste in her stride.  Red had popped out in her cheeks.  There was voice in each breath—­moans that her throat would not hold.

That night she slept in the kind of fifty-cent room the city offers its decent poor.  A slit of a room with a black-iron bed and a damp mattress.  A wash-stand gaunt with its gaunt mission.  A slop-jar on a zinc mat.  A caneless-bottom chair.  The chair she propped against the door, the top slat of it beneath the knob.  Through a night of musty blackness she lay in a rigid line along the bed-edge.

You who love the city for its million pulses, the beat of its great heart, and the terrific symphony of its soul, have you ever picked out from its orchestra the plaintive rune of the deserving poor?

It is like the note of a wind instrument—­an oboe adding its slow note to the boom of the kettle-drum, the clang of gold-colored cymbals, and the singing ecstasy of violins.

One such small voice Ann ’Lisbeth Connors added to the great threnody of industry.  Department stores that turned from her services almost before they were offered.  Offices gleaned from penny papers, miles of them, and hours of waiting on hard-bottom chairs in draughty waiting-rooms.  Faces, pasty as her own, lined up alongside, greedy of the morsel about to fall.

When the pinch of poverty threatens men and wolves, they grow long-faced.  In these first lean days, a week of them, Ann ’Lisbeth’s face lengthened a bit, too, and with the fuzz of yellow bangs tucked well up under her not so decent black hat, crinkles came out about her eyes.

Nights she supped in a family-entrance cafe beneath her room—­veal stew and a glass of beer.

She would sit over it, not unpleasantly muzzy.  She slept of nights now, and not so rigidly.

Then followed a week of lesser department stores as she worked her way down-town, of offices tucked dingily behind lithograph and small-ware shops, and even an ostrich-feather loft, with a “Curlers Wanted” sign hung out.

In what school does the great army of industry earn its first experience?  Who first employs the untaught hand?  Upon Ann ’Lisbeth, untrained in any craft, it was as if the workaday world turned its back, nettled at a philistine.