The Trimmed Lamp and Other Stories / Classic Short Story Collections: American Bd.5 (ePub)

Of course there are two sides to the question. Let
us look at the other. We often hear "shop-girls" spoken of.
No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make
their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an
adjective? Let us be fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on
Fifth Avenue as "marriage-girls."

Lou and Nancy were chums. They came to the big
city to find work because there was not enough to eat at their homes
to go around. Nancy was nineteen; Lou was twenty. Both were pretty,
active, country girls who had no ambition to go on the stage.

The little cherub that sits up aloft guided them
to a cheap and respectable boarding-house. Both found positions and
became wage-earners. They remained chums. It is at the end of six
months that I would beg you to step forward and be introduced to
them. Meddlesome Reader: My Lady friends, Miss Nancy and Miss Lou.
While you are shaking hands please take notice-cautiously-of
their attire. Yes, cautiously; for they are as quick to resent a
stare as a lady in a box at the horse show is.

Lou is a piece-work ironer in a hand laundry. She
is clothed in a badly-fitting purple dress, and her hat plume is four
inches too long; but her ermine muff and scarf cost $25, and its
fellow beasts will be ticketed in the windows at $7.98 before the
season is over. Her cheeks are pink, and her light blue eyes bright.
Contentment radiates from her.

Nancy you would call a shop-girl-because you
have the habit. There is no type; but a perverse generation is always
seeking a type; so this is what the type should be. She has the
high-ratted pompadour, and the exaggerated straight-front. Her skirt
is shoddy, but has the correct flare. No furs protect her against the
bitter spring air, but she wears her short broadcloth jacket as
jauntily as though it were Persian lamb! On her face and in her eyes,
remorseless type-seeker, is the typical shop-girl expression. It is a
look of silent but contemptuous revolt against cheated womanhood; of
sad prophecy of the vengeance to come...