The doorknob was brown porcelain, rubbed shiny, and the number seven on the door was half worn away.

This was a little street on New York's Lower East Side that she spelled Pelem Street, one block long and just wide enough for two ordinary wagons to pass each other. That morning her father stood at the door with twelve-year-old Rose, looked at his watch, then looked at her.

"Don't look so frightened," he said. "You need not go in until seven. Perhaps if you start in at this hour he will think you have been in the habit of beginning at seven and will not expect you to come in earlier. Remember, be independent. At seven o'clock rise and go home no matter whether the others go or stay."

He started to say something else, broke off, said "good-bye" over his shoulder and walked away fast. She watched him until he turned into Monroe Street. In a scrap of newspaper she had wrapped her thimble, her scissors and a piece of bread for breakfast, and she had carefully stuck two needles into the lapel of her coat.

Only once he was gone did she really feel afraid. Waiting made it worse, so she tried the porcelain knob.

Castle Garden

A few months earlier she had just arrived in America. In 1892 she had crossed the Atlantic with her Aunt Masha, out of a village in Russia, to join her father, who had gone ahead to New York. In her book she wrote that they rode from "Castle Garden" to their new home in a market wagon piled with immigrants' bedding. Her father tucked them in among the bundles and climbed up beside the driver, and they rattled over the cobbles with the noon sun beating on their heads.

She stared about her. One moment came a thrill: am I really in America at last? The next, a little disappointment, a little homesickness. Her father had changed. He had left home in a long black coat, with a full beard and earlocks. Now she saw a young man with a closely cut beard and no earlocks at all. At home he had been the most pious Jew in the neighborhood. She remembered Mindle at home saying that in America one at once became a libertine. Was it true?

His face was radiant, and every so often he looked over his shoulder and smiled. He seemed to guess what troubled her, and after a while he began to talk, quietly and reassuringly. He was a finisher on men's coats; he would take her to his own shop and teach her part of his trade. If they worked steadily and lived cheaply, they would soon have the money to send for her mother and the younger children. "Next year at this time," he smiled, "you yourself may be on the way to Castle Garden to fetch mother and the children." She smiled too, wiped away a few tears and resolved to work hard.

Home was a single tiny room in a Cherry Street tenement, its walls peacock blue, its window facing a grey courtyard. On the first morning only she and her aunt ate breakfast. Her father sat across from them, watching them dip buttered rolls into hot coffee, and asked again and again, "Is it good?" It was the first coffee of her life, and the first time in a month that she and her aunt had had enough to eat.

Mrs. Felesberg, from whom they rented the room, sat most of the day in the back room, finishing pants she brought home in big bundles from a shop and rocking a cradle with one foot. She drew them close and spoke in a whisper. Her husband pressed coats and earned twelve dollars when he worked a full week. Aunt Masha thought twelve dollars a good deal. Mrs. Felesberg smiled. "No doubt it would be," she said, "where you used to live. You had your own house, and most of the food came from the garden. Here you will have to pay for everything; the rent!" she sighed, "for the light, for every potato, every grain of barley."

Now Rose noticed how late her father worked. When he left in the morning it was still dark, and when he came home the lights in the halls were out. It was after ten. One night, as he sat eating the rice soup she had just learned to cook, she sat on the cot and asked timidly: "Father, does everybody in America live like this? Go to work early, come home late, eat and go to sleep? And the next day again work, eat and sleep? Will I have to do that too? Always?"

He thought, ate two or three mouthfuls, and smiled. "No. You will get married."

The High Stool on Monroe Street

One Sunday her father came home at noon and took her to the shop where he worked. They climbed the dark, narrow stairs of a Monroe Street tenement into a bright room full of noise, with five or six men and one girl. The men turned to look. She was scared and stumbled. One man asked in surprise, "Avrom, is this your daughter? Why, she is only a little girl!"

Her father smiled. "Yes, but wait till you see her sew."

He set her on a high stool across from the girl, laid a pile of pocket flaps on the narrow table between them, and showed her how to baste. All afternoon she sat on the stool with her knees crossed tailor fashion, basting flaps. A big man stood at a big table examining, brushing and folding coats. Sun streamed through the window above him, showing millions of specks of dust dancing over the table and circling his head. He often puffed out his cheeks and blew the dust away in a great gust that she could feel at her own table.

At full speed the machines drowned everything. When they paused she caught the clink of scissors laid down in a hurry, a short question and answer, and the pounding of a heavy iron at the back of the room. Sometimes the machines stopped for a whole minute, and the men looked about and talked. She was always glad when they started again. She felt safer in their noise.

Late in the afternoon the boss's wife, Mrs. Nelson, came in to sew on buttons. "She is a real American," her father whispered. In very imperfect Yiddish Mrs. Nelson asked whether he had given his daughter an American name.

"Not yet. What would you call her? Her Yiddish name is Rahel."

"Rahel, Rahel," Mrs. Nelson repeated, winding thread around a button. "Let me see." The machines slowed, and the men looked interested. The presser called from the back of the room, "What is there to think about? Rahel is Rachel."

Mrs. Nelson turned to her. "Don't let them call you Rachel. Every loafer who sees a Jewish girl shouts 'Rachel' after her. And on Cherry Street where you live there are many saloons and many loafers. How would you like Ruth for a name?"

She said she would like to be called Ruth. Later she understood why everyone had cared so much. The day was long and dull, and any interruption was welcome.

"Keep Your Hands Off, Please"

The day began at six. She dressed standing up with her eyes shut, feeling for her buttons, and woke only when the damp morning air hit her in the street.

About an hour into the work, a little grey-bearded old man would come in lugging a big basket of food under black oilcloth. He was the shop pedlar. He always stopped by the door, leaned the basket against it and groaned, "Oh, the stairs, the stairs in America!" Each man took a roll, and the old man poured him a tiny glass of brandy for two cents. Her father bought her an apple and a sweet roll, and they ate as they worked. Two cents seemed a great deal to spend on breakfast. Still, she was often almost sick with hunger.

At noon came the big meal. Her father sent her out for half a pound of steak or a slice of beef liver, and sometimes a pint of beer shared with two or three other men. He broiled the steak in the open coal fire where the presser heated his irons, cut it into tiny squares, and pushed the juiciest pieces to her side of the plate. While there was still a good deal of meat left, he would lay down his fork and push back his chair as if he had eaten more than enough.

She learned fast, and he was pleased. After pocket flaps he taught her to baste coat edges. Two plies of overcoat cloth stitched in with canvas and tape made a stiff edge; her fingers ached as she rolled and basted, and sometimes a needle or two broke before one coat was done. He offered to finish for her, but when he gave her the choice she never let him. Bent over the coat in her lap, forcing the squeaking, sweat-wet needle through the cloth, she would whisper, "No, you shall not get the best of me!" When she won, her father, smiling, would say, "Rahel, your face is shining. Now rest a while."

Then she pushed her stool against the wall and looked around the shop. The boss often came over to borrow Atta's wax or small scissors, and almost every time he tried to pinch her cheek or take her hand. Atta always dodged, threatened him with the point of her needle, and said, half serious and half joking, "Keep your hands off, please." It was the first sentence Rose learned in English.

The presser held her attention most. His back was enormous and his chest narrow, and he lifted his twenty-five-pound iron with difficulty. He had been six years in America and still could not decide whether to send for his wife or, as he often said, "take a souvenir of America and go home to Russia." One day he put down his iron and asked her, "Rahel, if you were my little girl in Europe, what would you like me to bring you from America?" She thought, and said, "Earrings."

The next morning he came in with a massive gold watch and chain, a wedding ring and a small pair of earrings. A week later there was another presser in the shop, one with a straight back and a red beard.

Seven O'Clock

At the end of November, on a cold grey day, her father's light tan suit was worn thin and her calico frock had faded to tan in the wash. At a second-hand store on Division Street he bought her a fuzzy brown coat that reached a little below her waist, for fifty cents, and himself a thin, threadbare overcoat. Now they were ready for winter. About the time the bitter cold came, he told her he had found her work in another shop, through a presser he knew. She was to earn her own wages. That was how she came to stand at the door on Pelem Street.

The door gave heavily and swung slowly shut. Halfway up the stairs it closed entirely and left her in the dark. She groped to the top, heard machines, found a door and pushed in. A tall, dark, beardless man was folding coats. "Yes," he said crossly. "What do you want?"

"I am the new feller hand."

He looked her over from head to foot. Her face burned so that she could hardly see. "It is more likely," he said, "that you can pull bastings than fell sleeve lining." He shouted over the machines, "Presser, is this the girl?" The presser put down his iron. "I suppose so. I only know the father."

The boss kicked a chair with its back broken off over to the finishers' table, threw a coat onto it, and said with one corner of his mouth raised, "Make room for the new feller hand."

A girl tittered. Two men glanced over their shoulders and pushed their chairs a little apart. She dropped her coat somewhere, pushed her bread into the sleeve, and stumbled into the space. The men were so close on either side that she felt the heat of their bodies and could not help shrinking. They noticed and were probably hurt; one made a joke, the other laughed, and the girls bent low over their work. Then the thought came: if I don't do this coat quickly and well, he will send me away at once. She threaded her needle, repeating her father's lesson: don't twist the sleeve lining, take small false stitches.

Her hands shook so that she could not hold the needle properly, and the first coat took a long time. She carried it to the boss and stood waiting while he tried every stitch with his needle. At last he put it down and, without looking at her, handed her two more. She was overjoyed. She sat down with her knees pressed together and stitched as fast as she could.

When the pedlar came, everyone bought rolls. She was hungry but too ashamed to eat her plain, heavy rye bread in front of them. By the end of the day she knew this was a "piece work shop," with four machines and sixteen people; that she had done almost as much as "the grown-up girls"; and that they did not like her. She heard Betsy, the head feller hand, talking about "a snip of a girl coming and taking the very bread out of your mouth."

Seven o'clock came, and everyone worked on. She wanted to get up and go home as her father had told her. But she did not have the courage to stand up alone. She put it off minute by minute, her neck stiff, her back aching, wishing the chair had a back to lean on. When people finally began to leave, it seemed to her it had been night for a long time.

"Hurry!"

The next morning she came in at seven to find everyone already there, working as steadily as if they had been at it for hours. She had barely put away her coat when the boss shouted, "Look here, girl, if you want to work here you better come in early. No office hours in my shop." The room went still; even the machines stopped. He brought her two coats and snapped, "Hurry with these!"

From that hour a hard life began. He would employ her only by the week, at three dollars, and for that he drove her from early until late. He gave her two coats at a time, and each time he handed her more he said, quick and sharp, "Hurry!" When he did not say it, he looked at her, and she heard it even more plainly. Late at night, as the others stood to fold their work away and she rose too, stiff in every limb, dreading the cold empty room and the uncooked rice, he would come over with one more coat. "I need it the first thing in the morning."

She understood that he was taking advantage of her because she was a child. With the shop dark except for the low gas jet over her table and the one over his, and no one to see, more tears fell on the sleeve lining than there were stitches in it.

After a few weeks she told her father, "The boss is hurrying the life out of me." She thought later that if she had put it less strongly he would have paid more attention; he hated to hear things put strongly. Besides, he worked terribly hard himself, leaving at five in the morning and never home before eleven. "Work a little longer until you have more experience," he said; "then you can be independent."

"But if I did piece work, father, I would not have to hurry so. And I could go home earlier when the other people go."

He explained further. "It pays him better to employ you by the week. Don't you see if you did piece work he would have to pay you as much as he pays a woman piece worker. This way he gets almost as much work out of you for half the amount a woman is paid."

She did not want to leave, either, for fear of losing a day or more finding other work. Losing half a dollar meant her mother and the children would come that much later, and she wanted them more than ever. As closing time came near, she would sit stitching and pretend they were home waiting. Walking back with her eyes on the ground to shut out everything else, she saw it all: the warm smell of food, her mother at the door, the children shouting and pulling her down, her mother scolding, "Let her take her coat off, see how cold her hands are!" Browned meat and potatoes for supper.

She kept it up until she turned the key, opened the door and stood facing the dark, cold, silent room.

The Knob in the Snow

One morning she started up and saw the lamp turned up a little and most of the loaf on the table, and knew her father had gone. She peered at the clock: a quarter to seven, she thought, very late. Half asleep, she slid out of bed and dressed, seeing the boss's eyes glaring at her the whole time. She buttoned every other button on her shoes, smoothed back her hair and left the tangles for Saturday, broke off a hunk of bread, snatched a piece of newspaper and blew out the light.

Going through the dark hall, she noticed how quiet the whole house was. She drew the street door open, and a fierce gust tore it from her hand and slammed it. A heavy snow had fallen in the night. She wound her braid around her neck under her collar, opened the door again and stepped out. There were no steps, only flat white. She tucked the bread under her arm, slipped each bare hand into the opposite sleeve like a muff, and ran. One moment the wind wound her calico skirt around her knees so that she could not take a step; the next it blew it high in the air. She stopped, unbuttoned her coat with stiff fingers and folded the fronts tight across her chest. The cold lay on it like an iron weight, and she could not breathe.

When she was exhausted she stopped and looked around. Nothing was familiar. The rows of houses on both sides stood so still they looked like stone walls. It is like a prison, she thought, and suddenly it seemed she was in a prison and the dark figures were chasing her, and she ran in terror, into a place where the walls rose higher and the space between them narrowed. She ran to a door and clung to it with her face against it and her eyes closed. Her numb fingers groped until they closed over something they knew at once.

She had run to the shop by instinct. In her hand was the brown porcelain knob.

Looking at the dark windows across the way, she slowly realized she had left home too early. She pressed into the corner of the doorway. Her knees bent of their own accord, and she sat down in the snow. The bread slipped from under her arm, and it made her a little uneasy to see it lying there. Her head leaned back against the door. She began to feel very comfortable, as if she were sitting on something soft; she no longer felt the cold. The wind grew quieter and quieter, and the street lights shone faintly.

Something pressed her arm, then shook her roughly, and a familiar voice said, "For God's sake, girl, what are you doing here?"

It was the presser from her shop. He pulled her up the dark stairs, propped her against a wall—"Now stand here until I light the gas"—then sat her by the fireplace, covered her with coats, shoveled the ashes out, and emptied bundle after bundle of wood into the grate until it crackled. "I won't put any coal on until you are quite warm," he said. "It would take too long to burn up." And to himself: "When he sees how much wood I used this morning he will hang himself, and I'll never hear the end of it."

When her tongue thawed she told him how she came to be out so early. He asked whether she had anything to eat; she said she had dropped her bread in the snow. He went and found it. "Good! You have bread and I have some slices of smoked salmon." She said she didn't care for any. He looked offended. "If you won't accept anything, it means that you would not give anything of yours either." To show him that wasn't so, she tried to break her bread in half, but her fingers were too numb, so she handed it to him. "Good! You will take half of my salmon and I'll take half of your bread."

As they ate by the fire he told her he had escaped from the Russian army a year before; his wife and two-year-old daughter were still in Russia, and he was saving to send for them. She told him about her father, her mother and the children, and how they hoped to send for them in spring. "That is why I am working so hard," she said earnestly. His eyes seemed to laugh at her, but he answered seriously, "Yes, you have to sweat for your slice of bread." Then he stood listening at the door. "There he comes, the Vampire. I hear his footsteps in the hall."

That morning she could not get warm. Her fingers were so numb she pricked her thumb without feeling it, and only knew when she saw a tiny red stain on a white sleeve lining. Her heart pounded. How much was a sleeve lining? Fifty cents, perhaps a dollar? She folded that coat and hid it under her chair, and thought of nothing else all morning. At noon the presser rubbed and rubbed the stain with benzine, then lost patience. "An unusual thing, a stain on a coat," he said, and flung it onto the pile on the boss's table.

The Whistle

One day the men were whispering. At noon they stood outside in the snow eating sandwiches, stamping their feet, arguing in anxious undertones. Inside, the boss looked gloomier than ever. A stranger came to his table to talk, and he shouted, "I'll not have anyone coming into my shop and telling me what to do. This shop is mine. The machines are mine. If they are willing to work on my conditions, well and good; if not, let them go to the devil! All the tailors are not dead yet."

"The men joined the union," Betsy whispered. "The boss is in a hurry for the work." There was a twinkle in her usually lifeless eyes.

Rose had no idea what a union was. The next morning, a little after six, she found only the three girls from her table and the boss. The men came in at five minutes to seven and stood talking quietly at the presser's table while the boss brushed coats furiously and glanced at the clock. At the first stroke of seven the presser blew a whistle and every man went to his place. At twelve he blew it again and the men went out to eat; those who stayed ate slowly and read their newspapers. The boss kept his eye on the girls, who began last, ate in a hurry and went straight back to work. Betsy, her back bent from years of felling, grumbled, "This is what it means to belong to a union. You get time to straighten out your bones."

At seven in the evening the whistle blew, and the men rose almost as one, put away their work and turned out the lights over their tables and machines. The girls watched them go with envy. The boss turned his back to the door and did not answer their "Good-night." In the dark and quiet that followed, his great shears clipped loudly and angrily.

One Saturday afternoon her father took a little book with a red paper cover from his breast pocket. "This is my union book. You too must join the union." A few feller hands had organized, he had heard, and there was to be a mass meeting that evening in a hall on Clinton Street. At eight he left her at the door and told her to follow a young woman inside. The lights, the red carpet and the crowd on the benches dazzled her. The only seats left were in front, and she ended up barely two yards from the platform, painfully aware of her bare head, her red hands with their cracked and bleeding skin, and her worn-out shoes with turned-up toes, still too big for her.

The young man speaking lived a few doors away on Cherry Street; Kate Felesberg had told her he was a "student." Fourteen hours a day, he said, you sit on a chair, often without a back, felling coats, so close to the next girl that you feel the heat of her body and her breath on your face; in winter you are numb with cold, and in summer there might as well be no sun and no green grass. You expect to get married—but the man in the shop is working fourteen hours too, and you may have to go back. Worse, your children may have to go. "In the winter before daylight your little daughter may have to run through the streets in the rain and the snow in her worn little shoes and thin coat. She will stand trembling before the boss in the same dull shop, perhaps, where you had once stood. She will sit in the same backless chair, rickety now, with her little back bent, for fourteen hours."

He seemed to be looking straight at her. She tucked her feet under the bench and bent her head to hide her tears. Who is this man, she wondered. How does he know all this?

"Each one of you alone can do nothing. Organize! … Together you can gain everything."

The room was still for a moment, then broke into a storm of applause. She waited in a corner until the hall was almost empty, then went to the secretary's desk. "I want to join the union."

Out of the Shadow

The feller hands in her shop joined too, and it became a "strictly union shop." But not many girls joined, and the union soon broke up. In those same weeks she began night school, going straight from the shop without supper because the doors closed at half past seven. The light and the warmth she was not used to, and the girls reading aloud one after another in a slow monotone, soon put her to sleep. Before she dropped off the first night she learned one word: "Sometimes." It was the longest word on the page.

She left the Pelem Street shop soon after the union broke up; she could not remember why. Later shops were good and bad. One kind boss kept a whole packet of needles in his breast pocket because she kept losing hers, then one Saturday at his home motioned her to sit on his knee; when she backed toward the door he counted out three dollars and told her to have her father find her a new shop. Another boss promised the week's pay for Sunday and vanished on Friday night. How long does it take to get to Canada, the presser asked—twenty-four hours? Then he's probably there now.

Later she fell ill, spent time in a hospital and worked as a servant. According to later biographical accounts, Lillian Wald looked after her in her illness and sent her on to a cooperative shirtwaist shop run by Leonora O'Reilly. She studied in night classes and workers' schools, and with the encouragement of a night-class teacher she wrote down her story. Out of the Shadow appeared in 1918, dedicated to Leonora O'Reilly. One reviewer wrote that it led to no conclusion of arresting prosperity: "It is just such a record as may be true of thousands of immigrant girls. Therein its greatest value lies."

She published a few more stories and sketches and spent the summers of 1923 and 1924 writing at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. In 1925 she died at forty-five. No one has been able to say how.

In Out of the Shadow, after all those winters, she set down one moment she would "always remember," and how proud she felt: the first evening after her shop became a union shop, when at seven o'clock the presser blew his whistle, and she stood up with the other girls, together with the men.

It was what her father had told her at the porcelain doorknob: at seven o'clock rise and go home.

Notes on fact and narrative

1. Every scene, line of dialogue and feeling here comes from Rose Cohen's autobiography Out of the Shadow (1918); nothing is invented. Quotations are from the English original. The shop scenes rest on her account alone, written more than twenty years later; most people in them appear only by first name or nickname, and she did not remember the Pelem Street boss's name. No independent contemporary record was found.

2. Dates: the book gives few. Her arrival with Aunt Masha in 1892 is from Thomas Dublin's Jewish Women's Archive entry, cited via English Wikipedia. The move to the Pelem Street shop "at the end of November," the snowstorm, the union and night school are placed in the winter of 1892–93 from the book's sequence (the next chapter opens "So a year almost passed and spring came"). The timeline marks this "November 1892" as an inference.

3. "Castle Garden": she writes that they drove "from Castle Garden." The Castle Garden immigrant station closed in 1890, and from January 1, 1892, immigrants to New York were inspected at Ellis Island (English Wikipedia, Castle Clinton and Ellis Island). She probably used the old name common among immigrants, or misremembered. The text keeps her words, flagged as hers, and the map does not show this point.

4. Places: "Pelem Street" is kept as she spelled it; its exact location and present name were not verified. The Clinton Street hall and the Monroe Street shop's address were not verified either, and none are mapped. The Cherry Street map point uses English Wikipedia's coordinates for the street, not for her building.

5. Age twelve: in chapter IX her mother says "child twelve years old." She was born April 4, 1880 (Jewish Women's Archive), so she was twelve in the winter of 1892.

6. Her later life (Lillian Wald's help in illness, domestic service, Leonora O'Reilly's cooperative shirtwaist shop, classes at the Educational Alliance's Breadwinners' College and the Rand School, her short stories, MacDowell in 1923 and 1924) is from English Wikipedia's "Rose Gollup Cohen," citing the Jewish Virtual Library and the Jewish Women's Archive, and from MacDowell's artist page, at second hand. The night-class teacher's encouragement and the reviewer's words are from Thomas Dublin's introduction to the 1995 Cornell edition (publisher's online preview). Her death in 1925 is unexplained: Dublin notes a New York Times report of September 17, 1922, of a suicide attempt by a "Rose Cohen, 40," which cannot be firmly tied to her, and Anzia Yezierska's 1927 story "Wild Winter Love," modeled on her, ends in suicide. This story says only that no one can say how she died.

7. The story stops before she entered Mr. Cohen's shop. The arrival of her mother and siblings, her service, hospital stay and settlement-house education in the later chapters are not followed here.

Sources and versions

1. Main source: Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1918), dedicated to Leonora O'Reilly. Read in the Internet Archive scan's OCR text (outofshadow00cohe, https://archive.org/details/outofshadow00cohe; djvu.txt sha256 cd14ffe269abc22ce096914d0e932845e41736608919dab17e4044051aa5f707, downloaded October 30, 2026): the opening of Part One and chapters IX, XV–XXII and XXVII–XXXII. Published in the United States in 1918; public domain in the US.

2. Thomas Dublin, "Introduction to the 1995 Edition," in Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), publisher's online preview (https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9780801471438_A29968225/preview-9780801471438_A29968225.pdf); used only for the review quotation, the night-class teacher and clues to her last years.

3. Thomas Dublin, "Rose Gollup Cohen," Jewish Women's Archive Encyclopedia (https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/cohen-rose-gollup; checked through a search-engine excerpt, as the site refused direct access), for her birth date (April 4, 1880) and death year; Jewish Women's Archive, "Out of the Shadow" reading series (https://jwa.org/discover/inthepast/readingseries/cohen); MacDowell artist page (https://www.macdowell.org/artists/rose-cohen).

4. English Wikipedia, "Rose Gollup Cohen," "Castle Clinton," "Ellis Island," "Cherry Street (Manhattan)" and "Peterborough, New Hampshire" (consulted October 30, 2026), used only for secondhand biography, the immigrant stations' dates and map coordinates.

5. Chapters: the doorknob, her father's advice, the first day and not standing up at seven are in chapter XXVII; "No office hours," three dollars a week, "Hurry!", piece work against weekly pay and the imagined homecoming in chapter XXVIII; the snowstorm, the presser's fire, salmon and bread and "the Vampire" in chapter XXIX; the blood stain in chapter XXX; the union, the whistle, the red union book, the Clinton Street meeting, joining, night school and the two later bosses in chapter XXXI; Castle Garden, the wagon and her father's trimmed beard in chapter XV; the peacock-blue room, coffee, Mrs. Felesberg and "You will get married" in chapter XVI; the Monroe Street shop and the name Ruth in chapter XIX; the pedlar, the broiled steak, basting edges, "Keep your hands off, please" and the presser's earrings in chapter XX.