shifting lines. She felt the flow of the tide of effort and
interest--felt her own helplessness without quite realising the
wisp on the tide that she was. She cast about vainly for some
possible place to apply, but found no door which she had the
courage to enter. It would be the same thing all over. The old
humiliation of her plea, rewarded by curt denial. Sick at heart
and in body, she turned to the west, the direction of Minnie's
flat, which she had now fixed in mind, and began that wearisome,
baffled retreat which the seeker for employment at nightfall too
often makes. In passing through Fifth Avenue, south towards Van
Buren Street, where she intended to take a car, she passed the
door of a large wholesale shoe house, through the plate-glass
windows of which she could see a middle-aged gentleman sitting at
a small desk. One of those forlorn impulses which often grow out
of a fixed sense of defeat, the last sprouting of a baffled and
uprooted growth of ideas, seized upon her. She walked
deliberately through the door and up to the gentleman, who looked
at her weary face with partially awakened interest.

"What is it?" he said.

"Can you give me something to do?" said Carrie.

"Now, I really don't know," he said kindly. "What kind of work
is it you want--you're not a typewriter, are you?"

"Oh, no," answered Carrie.

"Well, we only employ book-keepers and typewriters here. You
might go around to the side and inquire upstairs. They did want