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The first money she could save out of her factory earnings had gone to settle that four-year-old debt to Mr. Lavinski for the white slippers; the next went for bedclothes and cheese-cloth window curtains. Her ambition was no longer for the chintz hangings and gold-framed fruit pieces of Mrs.
Mr. Snawdor, Fidy Yager, Mrs. Smelts, and a dozen others, being the unfittest to survive, had paid the price of enlightenment. One sultry July night four years later Dr. Isaac Lavinski, now an arrogant member of the staff at the Adair Hospital, paused on his last round of the wards and cocked an inquiring ear above the steps that led to the basement.
As she took her seat on the first night, she looked up curiously. A new sound coming regularly from the inner room made her pause. "Is that a type-writer?" she asked incredulously. Mr. Lavinski, pushing his derby from his shining brow, smiled proudly. "Dat's vat it is," he said. "My Ike, he's got a scholarship offen de high school. He's vorking his vay through de medical college now.
Without pausing in his work he sized Nance up. "I von't take childern anny more. I tried it many times already. De inspector git me into troubles. It don't pay." "But I'll dodge the inspectors," urged Nance. "You know how to sew, eh?" "No; but you kin learn me. Please, Mr. Lavinski, Ikey said you would." Mr. Lavinski bestowed a doting glance on his son. "My Ikey said so, did he?
Once having tasted the joys of invalidism he was loathe to forego them, and insisted upon being regarded as a chronic convalescent. Nance might have managed Mr. Snawdor, however, had it not been for the grave problem of Fidy Yager. "Ike Lavinski says she ought to be in a hospital some place," she urged Mrs. Snawdor. "He says she never is going to be any better. He says it's epilepsy."
Smelts who had borrowed it some days before from Mrs. Lavinski, and the result was not what Mrs. Purdy predicted. "If ever I ketch you up to sech fool tricks again," scolded Mrs. Snawdor, who had been called to the rescue, "I'll skin yer hide off! You've no need to take yer hair down except when I tell you. You kin smooth it up jus' like you always done."
Demry, with his besetting sin and his beautiful influence on every child with whom he came in contact? Was Mr. Clarke, working children under age in the factory to build up a great fortune for his son, very different from Mr. Lavinski, with his sweat-shop, hoarding pennies for the ambitious Ikey? Was Mrs. Clarke, shirking her duty to her father, any happier or any better than Mrs.
Ve vork fer him now, an' some day he make big money an' take care of us!" Education as seen through Mr. Lavinski's eyes took on a new aspect for Nance. It seemed that you did not get rich by going to work at fourteen, but by staying at school and in some miraculous way skipping the factory altogether. "I vork with my hands," said Mr. Lavinski; "my Ikey, he vorks with his head."
Lavinski kindly, in her wheezing voice. "I tell Ikey you do verra good." Mrs. Lavinski looked shriveled and old. She wore a glossy black wig and long ear-rings, and when she was not coughing, she smiled pleasantly over her work. Once Mr. Lavinski stopped pressing long enough to put a cushion at her back. "My Leah is a saint," he said. "If effra'boddy was so good as her, the Messiah would come."
Snawdor signaled for help, Nance responded to the cry with positive enthusiasm. Here was something stimulating at last. There was immediate work to be done, and she was the one to do it. As she hurried up the steps of Number One, she found young Dr. Isaac Lavinski superintending the construction of a temporary door. "You can't come in here!" he called to her, peremptorily. "We're in quarantine.
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