Free Sister Carrie (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Theodore Dreiser

softness in the man’s manner and his simplicity of address.
    “Three and a half,” he answered.
    “Oh,” she was about to exclaim, but checked herself and allowed her thoughts to die without expression.
    “We’re not exactly in need of anybody,” he went on vaguely, looking her over as one would a package. “You can come on Monday morning, though,” he added, “and I’ll put you to work.”
    “Thank you,” said Carrie weakly.
    “If you come, bring an apron,” he added.
    He walked away and left her standing by the elevator, never so much as inquiring her name.
    While the appearance of the shop and the announcement of the price paid per week operated very much as a blow to Carrie’s fancy, the fact that work of any kind was offered after so rude a round of experience was gratifying. She could not begin to believe that she would take the place, modest as her aspirations were. She had been used to better than that. Her mere experience and the free out-of-door life of the country caused her nature to revolt at such confinement. Dirt had never been her share. Her sister’s flat was clean. This place was grimy and low, the girls were careless and hardened. They must be bad-minded and hearted, she imagined. Still, a place had been offered her. Surely Chicago was not so bad if she could find one place in one day. She might find another and better later.
    Her subsequent experiences were not of a reassuring nature, however. From all the more pleasing or imposing places she was turned away abruptly with the most chilling formality. In others where she applied only the experienced were required. She met with painful rebuffs, the most trying of which had been in a manufacturing cloak house, where she had gone to the fourth floor to inquire.
    “No, no,” said the foreman, a rough, heavily built individual, who looked after a miserably lighted workshop, “we don’t want any one. Don’t come here.”
    With the wane of the afternoon went her hopes, her courage, and her strength. She had been astonishingly persistent. So earnest an effort was well deserving of a better reward. On every hand, to her fatigued senses, the great business portion grew larger, harder, more stolid in its indifference. It seemed as if it was all closed to her, that the struggle was too fierce for her to hope to do anything at all. Men and women hurried by in long, shifting lines. She felt the flow of the tide of effort and interest—felt her own helplessness without quite realising the wisp on the tide that she was. She cast about vainly for some possible place to apply, but found no door which she had the courage to enter. It would be the same thing all over. The old humiliation of her plea, rewarded by curt denial. Sick at heart and in body, she turned to the west, the direction of Minnie’s flat, which she had now fixed in mind, and began that wearisome, baffled retreat which the seeker for employment at nightfall too often makes. In passing through Fifth Avenue, south towards Van Buren Street, where she intended to take a car, she passed the door of a large wholesale shoe house, through the plate-glass window of which she could see a middle-aged gentleman sitting at a small desk. One of those forlorn impulses which often grow out of a fixed sense of defeat, the last sprouting of a baffled and uprooted growth of ideas, seized upon her. She walked deliberately through the door and up to the gentleman, who looked at her weary face with partially awakened interest.
    “What is it?” he said.
    “Can you give me something to do?” said Carrie.
    “Now, I really don’t know,” he said kindly. “What kind of work is it you want—you’re not a typewriter, are you?”
    “Oh, no,” answered Carrie.
    “Well, we only employ book-keepers and typewriters here. You might go around to the side and inquire upstairs. They did want some help upstairs a few days ago. Ask for Mr. Brown.”
    She hastened around to the side entrance and was taken up by