"Chicago--printing--anything to do I could get. Sometimes make forty cents a day. Little. Have to feed and work for wife and three children. I try and try. Hod-carrier"--Giotto laughed at the memory--"press coats--anything. Then come back here."
"I try to make labor union with Italians. Hard work. Italians live like pigs--ignorant--not--not _social_. Down-stairs live a Calabria man, makes ice-cream--got four rooms--in the four rooms man, wife, mother, five children, fifteen boarders--"
"So maybe your paper help. Many Italians read English. I make them read your paper, Mr. Joe."
It was not until nearly the end of the week that Joe sought out Sally Heffer. Though every day he meditated stepping down that narrow red side street, each time he had felt unprepared, throbbingly incapable; but this evening as he finished his work and was on the way home it seemed that beyond his own volition he suddenly swerved at her corner, hurried down the lamp-lit pave, searched out the faded number in the meager light, mounted the stoop, and pushed open the unlocked door.
He was very weary--heart-sick and foot-sore--as he climbed the dark steps of the three-story house. He felt pent in the vast pulsations of life about him--a feeling of impossibility, of a task greater than he could bear. He simply had to see the young woman who was responsible for sending him here. He had a vivid mental image of her tragic loveliness, of how she had stepped back and forth before him and suddenly put her hands to her face and wept, of how she had divined his suffering, and impulsively seized his hand, and whispered, "I have faith in you." He expected a sort of self-illumined Joan of Arc with eyes that saw visions, with spirit flaming. And even in the dark top-floor hallway he was awed, and almost afraid.
Then in the blackness, his eyes on the thread of light beneath the rear door, he advanced, reached up his hand, and knocked.
There came, somehow surprising him, a definite, clear-edged voice:
He opened the door, which swung just free of the narrow cot. Just beyond, Sally Heffer was writing at a little table, and the globed gas burned above her, lighting the thin gold of her sparse hair. She turned her face to him quite casually, the same pallid, rounded face, the same broad forehead and gray eyes, of remarkable clarity--eyes that were as clear windows allowing one to peer in. And she was dressed in a white shirtwaist and the same brown skirt, and over a hook, behind her, hung the same brown coat. Yet Joe was shocked. This was not the Sally Heffer of his dreams--but rather a refreshing, forceful, dynamic young woman, brimming over with the joy of life. And even in that flash of strangeness he sensed the fact that at the time he had met her she was merely the voice of a vast insurgent spirit, merely the instrument of a great event. This was the everyday Sally, a quite livable, lovable human being, healthy, free in her actions, pulsing with the life about her. The very words she used were of a different order.