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Shopgirls from the Rue de l'Eglise, and laundresses from the Rue de Paris, curiously contemplated the equipages, with their stamping horses, and the coachmen, erect upon their boxes, motionless, and looking neither to the right nor the left.
Workmen hurried into the baker's and, coming out with a loaf under their arms, they went into the Veau a Deux Tetes, three doors higher up, to breakfast at six sous. Next the baker's was a shop where fried potatoes and mussels with parsley were sold. A constant succession of shopgirls carried off paper parcels of fried potatoes and cups filled with mussels, and others bought bunches of radishes.
We went into his chief establishment to make some purchases, and found it full of customers, chiefly women, neatly dressed after the Donegal fashion, and busily chaffering with the shopgirls and shopmen, who had their hands full, exhibiting goods such as certainly would not be found in any New York or New England village of this sort.
All that he saw deepened his melancholy; the soldiers starting out vaguely from barracks, not knowing what to do, but free for a time, and hoping, a little heavily, for some adventure to break the military monotony of their lives; the shopgirls, also in hope of something to "take them out of themselves" pathetic desire of escape from the little prison, where the soul sits, picking its oakum sometimes, in its cell of flesh! young men making for the parks, workmen for the public houses, an old woman, in a cap, peering out of an upper window in Prince's Gate; Italians with an organ, and a monkey that looked as if it were dying of nostalgia; women hurrying whither? with anxious faces, and bodies whose very shapes, and whose every movement, suggested, rather proclaimed, worry.
There were others who had wandered over the border of middle age and who were bald and strangely adipose, with mackerel eyes and unpleasant mouths. They were with young girls, gaudily but shabbily dressed, shopgirls perhaps, or artists' models or stenographers, who in dull and sordid lives grappled any chance to obtain a square meal, even if it had to be accessory to such companionship.
Inevitably materialism conquered, at least for the moment. The demand for luxuries was only equaled by the craze for entertainment. Artisans and shopgirls invaded the jewelry stores of Fifth Avenue. Metropolitan life was a succession of luncheons and teas, where fertile brains were busied with the invention of new dancing steps rather than the issues of the European war.
Thereafter, until she could get another dress, she must expect to be classed as poor and seedy therefore, on the way toward deeper poverty therefore, an object of pity and of prey. If she went into a shop, she would be treated insultingly by the shopgirls, despising her as a poor creature like themselves.
They are all ghosts, as Carlyle tells you, imprisoned for a time in coverings of flesh, and a car packed full of real ghosts passing over the earth on their quick journey to the grave ought to stir you. The giggling shopgirls whose life of misery is still a joke to them blessed youth! should interest you deeply.
A subtle distinction divided her from the over-dressed shopgirls around her as completely as her sex separated her from the portly masculine breadwinner in the opposite seat.
Patsy stopped her recital to laugh once more, with genuine merriment, but her cousin Beth seemed annoyed and Uncle John was frankly bewildered. "But what what was it all about?" he inquired. "Why, they were taking a moving picture, that was all, and the workmen and shopgirls and policemen were all actors.
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