JOAN THURSDAY

JOAN THURSDAY




I


She stood on the southeast corner of Broadway at Twenty-second Street,
waiting for a northbound car with a vacant seat. She had been on her
feet all day and was very tired, so tired that the prospect of being
obliged to stand all the way uptown seemed quite intolerable. And so,
though quick with impatience to get home and "have it over with," she
chose to wait.

Up out of the south, from lower Broadway and the sweatshop purlieus of
Union Square, defiled an unending procession of surface cars, without
exception dark with massed humanity. Pausing momentarily before the
corner where the girl was waiting (as if mockingly submitting themselves
to the appraisal of her alert eyes) one after another received the
signal of the switchman beyond the northern crossing and ground
sluggishly on. Not one but was crowded to the guards, affording the girl
no excuse for leaving her position.

She waited on, her growing impatience as imperceptible as her fatigue:
neither of them discernible to those many transient stares which she
received with a semblance of blank indifference that was, in reality,
not devoid of consciousness. Youth will not be overlooked; reinforced by
an abounding vitality, such as hers, it becomes imperious. This girl was
as pretty as she was poor, and as young.

Judged by her appearance, she might have been anywhere between sixteen
and twenty years of age. She was, in fact, something over eighteen, and
at heart more nearly a child than this age might be taken to imply--more
a child than any who knew her suspected. She herself suspected it least
of all.

She looked what she liked to believe herself, a young woman of
considerable experience with life. Simple, and even cheap, her garments
still owned a certain distinction which she would without hesitation
have termed "stylish": a quality of smartness which somehow contrived
not incongruously to associate with inferior materials. Her shirtwaist
was of opaque linen, pleated, and while not laundry-fresh was still
presentable; her skirt fitted her hips snugly, and fell in graceful
lines to a point something short of her low tan shoes, showing stockings
of a texture at once coarse and sheer; to her hat, an ordinary straw
simply trimmed with a band and _chou_ of ribbon, she had lent some
little factitious character by deftly twisting it a trifle out of the
prevailing shape. Over one arm she carried a coat of the same material
as her skirt, and in her hand a well-worn handbag of imitation leather,
rather too large, and decorated with a monogram of two initials in
German silver. The initials were J-T: her name was Joan Thursby.

Uniform with a thousand sisters of the shop-counters, she was yet
mysteriously different. Men looked twice in passing; after passing some
turned to look again.

Her face, tinted by the glow of the western sky, was by no means poor in
native colour: a shade thin, its regular features held a promise, vague,
fugitive, and provoking. Her hair was a brown which hardly escaped being
ruddy, and her skin matched it, lacking alike the dusky warmth of the
brune and the purity of the blonde. She was neither tall nor short, but
seemed misleadingly smaller than she was in fact, thanks to the
slightness of a body more stupidly nourished than under-nourished or
immature. Her eyes were brown and large, and they were very beautiful
indeed when divorced from the vacancy of weary thinking.

It was only in this look of the unthinking toiler that unconsciously
she confessed her immense fatigue. Her features were relaxed into lines
and contours of apathy. She seemed neither to think nor even to be
capable of much sustained thought. Yet she was thinking, and that very
intensely if unconsciously. Her mind was not only active but was one of
considerable latent capacity: something which she did not in the least
suspect; indeed, it had never occurred to Joan to debate her mental
limitations. Her thoughts were as a rule more emotional than psychical:
as now, when she was intensely preoccupied with pondering how she was to
explain at home the loss of her position, and what would be said to her,
and how she would feel when all had been said ... and what she would
then do....

Daylight was slowly fading. Though it was only half-after six of an
evening in June, the sun was already invisible, smudged out by a
portentous bank of purplish cloud whose profile was edged with
fire-of-gold against a sky of tarnished blue--a sky that seemed dimmed
with the sweat of day-long heat and toil.