Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/22

Rh curve of her cheek, and how smooth the brow clasped in close waves of hair.

“I began at the wrong end,” he acknowledged. “But let me put Dillon’s case before you dismiss me.”

She softened. “It is only because of my interest in that poor fellow that I am here”

“Because you think he needs help—and that you can help him?”

But she held back once more. “Please tell me about him ﬁrst,” she said, walking on.

Amherst met the request with another question. “I wonder how much you know about factory life?”

“Oh, next to nothing. Just what I’ve managed to pick up in these two days at the hospital.”

He glanced at her small determined proﬁle under its dark roll of hair, and said, half to himself: “That might be a good deal.”

She took no notice of this, and he went on: “Well, I won’t try to put the general situation before you, though Dillon’s accident is really the result of it. He works in the carding room, and on the day of the accident his ‘card’ stopped suddenly, and he put his hand behind him to get a tool he needed out of his trouser-pocket. He reached back a little too far, and the card behind him caught his hand in its million of diamond-pointed wires. Truscomb and the overseer of the room maintain that the accident was due to his own [ 10 ]