Her old wonder of New York came back, as she thought that she was being flashed fifty miles an hour from the junction at Ninety-sixth Street down to Forty-second Street, under the busiest streets and corners of America. Mere men could manage much. Then the old agony stole in--“the freedom of ignorance.” Surely no one had ever been punished for doing a book as she had been punished: that it was so poor, as to prove a temptation for John Higgins to publish it, because of its chance of falling exactly into the fancy of these--the myriad of shopgirls in the uptown locals and expresses, crashing by in thick ropes of white light. As for the public taste, Dicky Cobden had told her that John Higgins had confessed, speaking wearily and with a smile that had lost its sting of reproach, that for thirty years he had been choosing stories for people to read, and every year he had been forced to lower his estimate as to what the public taste was. Even so, John Higgins had said he was far from the level; that only a trade mind could get stories banal enough. But hers might interest that public. She was so tired.... For somebody’s shoulder to lean against! Pidge knew what Fanny Gallup felt, what the other factory girls felt, when they pushed out so brazenly toward men--in very clumsiness from hard pressure, spoiling their chances of being treated on the square. Yes, she was really learning what the girls felt, as they hunted their own in the masses of men they passed--how tired, hungry, blurred, unsatisfied their hearts--anything to escape the withering grind of the mills and the counters and the shops. She knew the secret bloom they felt, the terrible brief drive of it--childhood, girlhood and youth, all passing like the uptown trains--a home, a man, a child of their own, the one chance for a breath of life. Of course, they talked of nothing else, in the closets and dressing rooms, in the cars and streets; and read nothing else. Certainly their dreams had to come true in books and plays, even if they didn’t in life. Life would break the dream soon enough. The best life could do didn’t compare with the lowliest dream; for the dream of a girl has glamour, and the life of a woman is stripped. But that was no reason why books and plays should tear off the glamour ahead of time. It wasn’t that Pidge loved shopgirls and mill girls. She didn’t love herself for sharing their lot. She wasn’t sentimental at all. She recognized bad management somewhere that forced her to this work. She had to have bread, and outer and under clothing. She paid the price, but there was nothing good nor virtuous about it. She didn’t hate Dicky Cobden when he spoke of “shopgirl literature”; she knew how rotten it was, but there was something in her that belonged to it, or she wouldn’t have been in the factory; moreover, that something had helped to write the _Lance_.