The Portion of Labor | Page 7

was able to point with her tiny pink finger at the window where
father worked. "That's where father works and earns money to buy nice
things for little Ellen," Andrew would repeat, beaming at her with
divine foolishness, and Ellen looked at the roaring, vibrating building
as she might have looked at the wheels of progress. She realized that
her father was very great and smart to work in a place like that, and
earn money--so much of it. Ellen often heard her mother remark with
pride how much money Andrew earned.
To-night, when Ellen passed in her strange flight, the factories were
still, though they were yet blazing with light. The gigantic buildings,
after a style of architecture as simple as a child's block house, and
adapted to as primitive an end, loomed up beside the road like
windowed shells enclosing massive concretenesses of golden light.
They looked entirely vacant except for light, for the workmen had all
gone home, and there were only the keepers in the buildings. There
were three of them, representing three different firms, rival firms,
grouped curiously close together, but Lloyd's was much the largest.
Andrew and Eva worked in Lloyd's.
She was near the last factory when she met a man hastening along with
bent shoulders, of intent, middle-aged progress. After he had passed her
with a careless glance at the small, swift figure, she smelt coffee. He
was carrying home a pound for his breakfast supply. That suddenly
made her cry, though she did not know why. That familiar odor of
home and the wontedness of life made her isolation on her little atom
of the unusual more pitiful. The man turned round sharply when she
sobbed. "Hullo! what's the matter, sis?" he called back, in a pleasant,

hoarse voice. Ellen did not answer; she fled as if she had wings on her
feet. The man had many children of his own, and was accustomed to
their turbulence over trifles. He kept on, thinking that there was a sulky
child who had been sent on an errand against her will, that it was not
late, and she was safe enough on that road. He resumed his calculation
as to whether his income would admit of a new coal-stove that winter.
He was a workman in a factory, with one accumulative interest in
life--coal-stoves. He bought and traded and swapped coal-stoves every
winter with keenest enthusiasm. Now he had one in his mind which he
had just viewed in a window with the rapture of an artist. It had a little
nickel statuette on the top, and that quite crowded Ellen out of his mind,
which had but narrow accommodations.
So Ellen kept on unmolested, though her heart was beating loud with
fright. When she came into the brilliantly lighted stretch of Main Street,
which was the business centre of the city, her childish mind was partly
diverted from herself. Ellen had not been down town many times of an
evening, and always in hand of her hurrying father or mother. Now she
had run away and cut loose from all restrictions of time; there was an
eternity for observation before her, with no call in-doors in prospect.
She stopped at the first bright shop window, and suddenly the
exultation of freedom was over the child. She tasted the sweets of
rebellion and disobedience. She had stood before that window once
before of an evening, and her aunt Eva had been with her, and one of
her young men friends had come up behind, and they had gone on, the
child dragging backward at her aunt's hand. Now she could stand as
long as she wished, and stare and stare, and drink in everything which
her childish imagination craved, and that was much. The imagination of
a child is often like a voracious maw, seizing upon all that comes
within reach, and producing spiritual indigestions and assimilations
almost endless in their effects upon the growth. This window before
which Ellen stood was that of a market: a great expanse of plate-glass
framing a crude study in the clearest color tones. It takes a child or an
artist to see a picture without the intrusion of its second dimension of
sordid use and the gross reflection of humanity.
Ellen looked at the great shelf laid upon with flesh and vegetables and

fruits with the careless precision of a kaleidoscope, and did not for one
instant connect anything thereon with the ends of physical appetite,
though she had not had her supper. What had a meal of beefsteak and
potatoes and squash served on the little white-laid table at home to do
with those great golden globes which made one end of the window like
the remove from a mine, those satin-smooth spheres, those cuts as of