noon
said the same cashier , sharply . One , such as she had only recently been , was waiting for her modest salary . It took her back to the few weeks in which she had collected -- or rather had received -- almost with the air of a domestic , four-fifty per week from a lordly foreman in a shoe factory -- a man who , in distributing the envelopes , had the manner of a prince doling out favours to a servile group of petitioners . She knew that out in Chicago this very day the same factory chamber was full of poor homely-clad girls working in long lines at clattering machines ; that at noon they would eat a miserable lunch in a half-hour ; that Saturday they would gather , as they had when she was one of them , and accept the small pay for work a hundred times harder than she was now doing . Oh , it was so easy now ! The world was so rosy and bright . She felt so thrilled that she must needs walk back to the hotel to think , wondering what she should do .