took my place in the pushing, laughing, growling crowd that made its
way up several flights of stairs to the big room where shabby clothes
are changed for yet shabbier working ones, my good-mornings were
greeted with less grudging acknowledgments, and now we are quite
friendly, these "Hands" and I, and through their eyes I am seeing
myself and others like me--seeing much and many things from an angle
never used before.

They nodded to me less hesitatingly as the days went by, and at the
noon hour, when I have my lunch with first one group and then
another, I find them, on the whole, frank and outspoken, find they
have as decided opinions concerning what they term people like
that--which term is usually accompanied by a gesture in the direction
where I once lived--as said people have concerning them, to whom, as
a rule, they also refer in much the same manner and with the same
words. With each group on either side of its separating gulf the
conviction is firm that little is to be hoped for or expected from
the other, and common qualities are forgotten in the realization of
distinctive differences.

"What's the most you ever made a week?" The girl who asked the
question moved up for me to sit on the bench beside her, and,
unwrapping a newspaper parcel, took from it a large cucumber pickle,
a piece of cheese, a couple of biscuits, and half of a cocoanut pie,
and laid them on a table in front of her. "Help yourself." She
pushed the paper serving as tray and cloth toward me. "I ain't had
much appetite lately. Hello, Mamie! Come over here and sit on our
bench. What you got good for lunch? My stomach's turned back on
pie. I'd give ten cents for a cup of coffee."