The old humiliation of her plea, rewarded by curt denial.

Sick at heart and in body, she turned to the west, the direction of Minnie'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.