There were two entrances to the building, one on Washington Place, the other round the corner on Greene Street. She went in at the Washington Place entrance and took the stairs. The elevator was for the management and visitors.

The Triangle Factory occupied the three top floors of the building, the eighth, ninth and tenth. On the stairs, she met Yetta, a Jewish girl who worked on the eighth floor, and she went onto that floor to finish their conversation. As well as the lines of work tables and sewing machines, the eighth floor contained the cutting tables, under which there were big boxes that would soon fill with discarded scraps of cotton as the cutters toiled. Beside one of the tables, Yetta showed Anna the steps of a new dance called the turkey trot. They both liked to dance, but a stern look from one of the foremen soon put a stop to that, and Anna made her way up to the ninth floor, where she worked.

The morning passed uneventfully. Not long ago the ninth floor had been refurbished with better washrooms and a nice wooden floor that caught the sunlight. At lunchtime, she went outside and walked about in Washington Square Park. She thought of the dance steps her friend had shown her. She wondered if Pasquale liked to dance.

It hadn’t taken her long to find out about Pasquale. As soon as Salvatore casually mentioned that they might be meeting a friend of his at the restaurant, she’d guessed he was up to something. As for Salvatore’s pathetic attempts to deny it, she’d soon dealt with that. When he confessed, she pretended to be angry. What she didn’t tell her brother was that she’d already noticed the young man looking at her, and she didn’t mind meeting him at all. But she told Salvatore that she didn’t know if she’d come with him or not, just to give him grief. She was smiling to herself as she went back into the building at the start of the afternoon.

Saturday afternoons were always a little hectic. At the end of the week’s work, the shipping clerks would be running around trying to get all the final orders completed. As finishing time approached, the pay packets were given out. You couldn’t go before the final bell, of course, but some of the girls who had young men waiting for them were getting ready to make a speedy exit. As the bell went, and the power to the machines was cut off, everybody rose. But Anna wasn’t in a hurry. She took a little mirror out of her bag. Might as well make herself look nice before meeting the mystery man. She attended to this while the girls started moving toward the door. She was still sitting there when she heard something strange. Someone was shouting.