As thoughts of Pete came to Maggie's mind, she began to havean intense dislike for all of her dresses.

"What deh hell ails yeh? What makes yeh be allus fixin' andfussin'? Good Gawd," her mother would frequently roar at her.

She began to note, with more interest, the well-dressed womenshe met on the avenues. She envied elegance and soft palms. Shecraved those adornments of person which she saw every day on thestreet, conceiving them to be allies of vast importance to women.

Studying faces, she thought many of the women and girls shechanced to meet, smiled with serenity as though forever cherishedand watched over by those they loved.

The air in the collar and cuff establishment strangled her. She knew she was gradually and surely shrivelling in the hot,stuffy room. The begrimed windows rattled incessantly from thepassing of elevated trains. The place was filled with a whirl ofnoises and odors.

She wondered as she regarded some of the grizzled women in theroom, mere mechanical contrivances sewing seams and grinding out,with heads bended over their work, tales of imagined or realgirlhood happiness, past drunks, the baby at home, and unpaid wages.She speculated how long her youth would endure. She began to seethe bloom upon her cheeks as valuable.

She imagined herself, in an exasperating future, as a scrawnywoman with an eternal grievance. Too, she thought Pete to bea very fastidious person concerning the appearance of women.

She felt she would love to see somebody entangle their fingersin the oily beard of the fat foreigner who owned the establishment. He was a detestable creature. He wore white socks with low shoes.When he tired of this amusement he would go to the mummies andmoralize over them.

Usually he submitted with silent dignity to all which he hadto go through, but, at times, he was goaded into comment.

"What deh hell," he demanded once. "Look at all dese littlejugs! Hundred jugs in a row! Ten rows in a case an' 'bout at'ousand cases! What deh blazes use is dem?"

Evenings during the week he took her to see plays in which thebrain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of herguardian, who is cruelly after her bonds, by the hero with thebeautiful sentiments. The latter spent most of his time out atsoak in pale-green snow storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver,rescuing aged strangers from villains.

Maggie lost herself in sympathy with the wanderers swooning insnow storms beneath happy-hued church windows. And a choir withinsinging "Joy to the World." To Maggie and the rest of the audiencethis was transcendental realism. Joy always within, and they, likethe actor, inevitably without. Viewing it, they hugged themselvesin ecstatic pity of their imagined or real condition.

The girl thought the arrogance and granite-heartedness of themagnate of the play was very accurately drawn. She echoed themaledictions that the occupants of the gallery showered on thisindividual when his lines compelled him to expose his extremeselfishness.

Shady persons in the audience revolted from the picturedvillainy of the drama. With untiring zeal they hissed vice andapplauded virtue. Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparentlysincere admiration for virtue.

The loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the unfortunate and theoppressed. They encouraged the struggling hero with cries, andjeered the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers. When anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery mourned.They sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin.

In the hero's erratic march from poverty in the first act, towealth and triumph in the final one, in which he forgives all theenemies that he has left, he was assisted by the gallery, whichapplauded his generous and noble sentiments and confounded thespeeches of his opponents by making irrelevant but very sharpremarks. Those actors who were cursed with villainy parts wereconfronted at every turn by the gallery. If one of them renderedlines containing the most subtile distinctions between right andwrong, the gallery was immediately aware if the actor meantwickedness, and denounced him accordingly.

The last act was a triumph for the hero, poor and of themasses, the representative of the audience, over the villainand the rich man, his pockets stuffed with bonds, his heart packedwith tyrannical purposes, imperturbable amid suffering.

Maggie always departed with raised spirits from the showingplaces of the melodrama. She rejoiced at the way in which the poorand virtuous eventually surmounted the wealthy and wicked. Thetheatre made her think. She wondered if the culture and refinementshe had seen imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on thestage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement houseand worked in a shirt factory.