Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/183

Rh parcels for "Madame Gilligan" over on Ninth Street.

That was fifteen years ago. They had been neighbors in Cherry Hill's "Dublin Row" at the time. But when her widowed mother died, she revolted against the slavery of her apprenticeship to the dressmaker, and went on the stage as a chorus-girl for three contemptuous years. The vanities of the theater had sickened her sturdy independence; she had returned to the working world as a shop-girl, and accepted a better position as a cloak model.

When Carney met her, she was adrift on the life of the city in a sort of unambitious isolation, working stolidly, lonely among the younger girls with whom she had no sympathy, and bruskly repelling any flippant advances from the men. She had lost track of all her girlhood acquaintances. "Dublin Row" had long since been torn down. When she saw Carney with his truck, it was like meeting an old friend in a world of strangers.

And he had accepted her, as an old friend, with the sympathetic interest of old friendship in all that had happened to her in the interval of absence. He had told her nothing about himself—except that he had worked hard and saved his money, having no one dependent on him. "Say," she asked him, at last, "why did n't you get married?"

"Never met the right girl," he said.

"Well," she joked, tempted by his stolidity, "how 'd I do?"

He looked at her. "Fine. Will yuh do it?"