regretfully, “you wait.” So the doctor’s daughter waited, perforce, and found a fresh outlet for her emotion. There had been a surprising influx of foreigners to the Altonia[76] in recent years, dark-eyed, dark-skinned South Europeans whom Ben Birdsall disliked and distrusted. [76] “Good Americans is good enough for me,” the superintendent liked to say virtuously. “Bunch o’ soreheads, always kickin’ about something. If it don’t suit ’em here, let ’em go back where they come from! Wish t’ th’ Lawd I dast clean ’em out, but we need ’em!” Glen found them odd and interesting. There were graybeards among them with simmering passion in their eyes who exhorted fellow workers at stealthy evening meetings, swarthy youths who flared into open resentment at a word, richly colored, full-breasted girls who moved among the mill workers like sly flames, and one outstanding figure, by reason of fervor and superior intelligence, a man called Black Orlo, who edited a tiny paper named The Torch. It came out weekly or monthly, as the editor was able to manage, and was printed in secret on a crude hand press, and while Mr. Carey had ordered its suppression, the sparks still flew, and some of them ignited the red-haired girl. “Glen,” Luke warned her, “I wouldn’t read that rag! I wouldn’t be caught with it!” But she continued to read it, for Black Orlo said in vigorous print the things she swallowed back every day of her life, and she found it a safety valve. The man himself, dark, saturnine, unshaven, unsavory,[77] was repulsive to her, but she found his utterances stimulating. [77] At five o’clock, on her nineteenth birthday, Luke had not returned to his office. She began to lose her hold on the radiant mood of the morning. She had wakened to such a definite sense of occasion but the day had jogged on in its accustomed groove, calmly and colorlessly, and being nineteen did not appear to have any especial significance after all. Gloriana-Virginia Tolliver, a small putty-colored person at a loom, shot out a lean little claw and caught hold of her skirt as she passed. “Glen,” she wheedled, “yo’all was goin’ to gimme a fairy-tale book to read out of, and learn me the biggest words. Did yo’ jes’ pintly fo’git?” Glen was remorseful. “I did forget, Glory. I thought of it the very last thing before I went to sleep, and I put it right where I would be sure to see
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