Sister Carrie / Сестра Кэрри. Книга для чтения на английском языке

”

“Thank you,” said Carrie weakly.

“If you come, bring an apron,” he added.

He walked away and left her standing by the elevator, never so much as inquiring her name[13 - much as inquiring her name – даже не спросив, как ее зовут].

This place was grimy and low, the girls were careless and hardened. They must be bad-minded and hearted, she imagined. Still, a place had been offered her. Surely Chicago was not so bad if she could find one place in one day. She might find another and better later.

Her subsequent experiences were not of a reassuring nature, however. From all the more pleasing or imposing places she was turned away abruptly with the most chilling formality. In other where she applied only the experienced were required. She met with painful rebuffs, the most trying of which had been in a manufacturing cloak house, where she had gone to the fourth floor to inquire.

“No, no,” said foreman, a rough, heavily built individual, who looked after a miserably lighted workshop, “we don’t want any one.

Don’t come here.”

With the wane of the afternoon went her hopes, her courage, and her strength. Sick at heart and in body, she turned to the west, the direction of Minie’s flat, which she had now fixed in mind, and begat that wearisome, baffled retreat makes. In passing through Fifth Avenue, south towards Van Buren Street, where she intended to take a car, she passed the door of a large wholesale shoe house, through the plate-grass window of which she could see a middle aged gentleman sitting at a small desk.

One of those forlorn impulses which often grow out of a fixed sense of defeat, the last sprouting of a baffled and uprooted growth through the door and up to the gentleman, who looked at her weary face with partially awakened interest.

“What is it?” he said.

“Can you give me something to do?” said Carrie.

“Now, I really don’t know,” he said kindly. “What kind of work is it you want – you’re not a typewriter, are you?”

“Oh, no,” answered Carrie.

“Well, we only employ book-keepers and typewriters here. You might go around to the side and inquire upstairs. They did want some help upstairs a few days ago. Ask for Mr. Brown.”

She hastened around to the side entrance and was taken up by the elevator to the fourth floor.

“Call Mr. Brown, Willie,” said the elevator man to a boy near by.