Читать книгу Sister Carrie / Сестра Кэрри. Книга для чтения на английском языке онлайн | страница 33

What have you been doing?”

“Working,” said Carrie.

“You don’t say so! At what?”

She told him.

“Rhodes, Morgenthua and Scott – why I know that house.

Over here on Fifth Avenue, isn’t it? They’re a close-fisted concern.

What made you go there?”

“I couldn’t get anything else,” said Carrie frankly.

“Well, that’s an outrage,” said Drouet. “You oughtn’t to be working for those people. Have the factory right back of the store, don’t they?”

“Yes,” said Carrie.

“That isn’t a good house,” said Drouet. “You don’t want to work at anything like that, anyhow.”

“So you lost your place because you got sick, eh?” he said.

“What are you going to do now?”

“Look around,” she said, a thought of the need that hung outside this fine restaurant like a hungry dog at her wheels passing into her eyes.

“Oh, no,” said Drouet, “that won’t do. How long have you been looking?”

“Four days,” she answered.

“Think of that!” he said, addressing some problematical individual. “You oughtn’t to be doing anything like that. These girls,” and he waved an inclusion of all shop and factory girls, “don’t get anything. Why, you can’t live on it, can you?”

He was a brotherly sort of creature in his demeanour.

“Why don’t you stay down town and go to the theatre with me?” he said, hitching his chair closer. The table was not very wide.

“Oh, I can’t,” she said.

“What are you going to do to-night?”

“Nothing,” she answered, a little drearily.

“You don’t like out there where you are, do you?”

“Oh I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do if you don’t get work?”

“Go back home, I guess.”

There was least quaver in her voice as she said this. Somehow, the influence he was exerting was powerful. They came to an understanding of each other without words – he of her situation, she of the fact that he realized it.

“No,” he said, “you can’t make it!” genuine sympathy filling his mind for the time. “Let me help you. You take some of my money”

“Oh, no!” she said, leaning back.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

She sat meditating, merely shaking her head.