As Shenah Pessah entered the dingy hall-room which Sadie Kranz called home, its chill and squalor carried her back to the janitor’s basement she had left that morning. In silence she watched her companion prepare the hot dogs and potatoes on the oil-stove atop the trunk. Such pressing sadness weighed upon her that she turned from even the smell of food. “My heart pulls me so to go back to my uncle.” She swallowed hard her crust of black bread. “He’s so used to have me help him. What’ll he do--alone?” “You got to look out for yourself in this world.” Sadie Kranz gesticulated with a hot potato. “With your quickness, you got a chance to make money and buy clothes. You can go to shows--dances. And who knows--maybe meet a man to get married.” “Married? You know how it burns in every girl to get herself married--that’s how it burns in me to work myself up for a person.” “Ut! For what need you to work yourself up. Better marry yourself up to a rich feller and you’re fixed for life.” “But him I want--he ain’t just a man. He is--” She paused seeking for words and a mist of longing softened the heavy peasant features. “He is the golden hills on the sky. I’m as far from him as the earth is from the stars.” “Yok! Why wills itself in you the stars?” her companion ridiculed between swallows. Shenah Pessah flung out her hands with Jewish fervor. “Can I help it what’s in my heart? It always longs in me for the higher. Maybe he has long ago forgotten me, but only one hope drives in me like madness--to make myself alike to him.” “I’ll tell you the truth,” laughed Sadie Kranz, fishing in the pot for the last frankfurter. “You are a little out of your head--plain mehsugeh.” “Mehsugeh?” Shenah Pessah rose to her feet vibrant with new resolve. “Mehsugeh?” she challenged, her peasant youth afire with ambition. “I’ll yet show the world what’s in me. I’ll not go back to my uncle--till it rings with my name in America.” She entered the factory, the next day, with a light in her face, a sureness in her step that made all pause in wonder. “Look only! How high she holds herself her head! Has the matchmaker promised her a man?” Then came her first real triumph. Shenah Pessah was raised above old hands who had been in the shop for years and made assistant to Sam Arkin, the man who had welcomed her that first day in the factory. As she was shown to the bench beside him, she waited expectantly for a word of welcome. None came. Instead, he bent the closer to his machine and the hand that held the shirt trembled as though he were cold, though the hot color flooded his face. Resolutely, she turned to her work. She would show him how skillful she had become in those few weeks. The seams sped under her lightning touch when a sudden clatter startled her. She jumped up terror-stricken. “The belt! The belt slipped! But it’s nothing, little bird,” Sam Arkin hastened to assure her. “I’ll fix it.” And then the quick warning, “Sh-h! The foreman is coming!”