Читать книгу The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West онлайн

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But now once more we feel the tension of anxious waiting, for again we hear the sound of footsteps fast approaching. A lifted umbrella first appears, and under it a woman’s dark skirt, all wet about the hem, and clinging to her ankles as she walks and vainly tries to hold it free from the sloppy pavement. Her eyes are on the ground, and she is humming softly to herself, and we think that she is safely past, when both of us start suddenly to a little cry, an exclamation of surprise:

“Oh-h-h! what in h— are you boys doing there?” And the question has in it a note of light-hearted merriment, as though the words had come upon a wave of rippling laughter.

She is facing us near at hand, her head framed in the dark umbrella which rests upon her shoulder, and her face in the full side-light of a neighboring window. Out of large dark eyes she is looking straight at us, and I mark at once the clean-cut pencilling of her eyebrows against a skin of natural pallor, and the backward sweep of black hair from a low forehead and about her ears. She is no beauty, but her mouth is one of almost faultless drawing, large and sensitive and firm, with a dimple at each corner, and her chin of perfect moulding fades into the graceful lines of a well-rounded throat.