THE SNOB


We happen to be on the same street car. A drizzle softens the windows. She
sits with her pasty face and her dull, little eyes looking out at the
dripping street. Her cotton suit curls at the lapels. The ends of her
shoes curl like a pair of burlesque Oriental slippers. She holds her hands
in her lap. Red, thick fingers that whisper tiredly, "We have worked," lie
in her lap.

A slavey on her day off. There is no mistaking this. Nineteen or twenty
years old, homely as a mud fence; ungraceful, doltish, she sits staring
out of the window and her eyes blink at the rain. A peasant from
southeastern Europe, a field hand who fell into the steerage of a
transatlantic liner and fell out again. Now she has a day off and she goes
riding into the country on a street car.

She will get off and slosh with her heavy feet through wet grass. She will
walk down the muddied roads and drink in the odor of fields and trees once
more. These are romantic conjectures. The car jolts along. It is going
west. The rain continues. It runs diagonal dots across the window.

Everybody out. This is the end of the line. I have gone farther than
necessary. But there is the slavey. We have been talking. At least I
talked. She listened, her doltish face opening its mouth, her little eyes
blinking. She has pimples, her skin is muddied. A distressful-looking
creature. Yet there is something. This is her day off--a day free from
the sweat of labor--and she goes on a street car into the country. So it
would seem that under this blinking, frowzy exterior desire spreads its
wings. She has memories, this blousy one. She has dreams.