Flo went on through the market, but she was thinking too much about what was going to happen to her to feel any more interest in the stalls. She turned out at the first door and behind the Town Hall. As she was walking up to the main street she saw Sally Gore crossing with a Navy man. Sally had her hair in long swaying ringlets and was looking up at the sailor with a laugh as if she had known him for years, which Flo didn’t think likely because never before had she seen them together. But, of course, Sally always had been able to get friends anywhere. Flo held back, aware of her loneliness again; and then all at once she felt that it would be a good thing when she got away. She would be able to start fresh. Here everybody knew her, and everything about her, and didn’t bother with her; but there she wouldn’t be so . . . so . . . Well, she’d stick up for herself, as Mrs. Mawson said. And perhaps she’d find someone; and forgetting her flowers she began to look about for the kind of man that she thought she’d like to walk out with. In Duke Street she came unexpectedly into a rush, all the men and boys loosed from the shipyard, jostling and mostly jovial because of pay-day and the afternoon’s freedom before them. They took no notice of her, and to avoid being bumped into she had to stand against the front of the Town Hall. Most of the men were oil-smudged and dirty, their caps greasy, overalls tattered. Flo was used to these things and looked only for faces, but talking and grinning they went past so fast that there was no time to choose. They were a blur and she gave up, and in less than five minutes the younger men were past and there were only the less eager ones, all probably married. She wondered where Jack Oates was; Jack who had gone to sea, nobody knew exactly how or where. She remembered how he had been truant from school for two days and then when they went out for afternoon playtime he had been there behind the shelter and had boasted about the job he had got. After that none of them had seen him for more than nine months till again he had turned up at the school gates, but this time he had been hardly recognisable, he had grown so and broadened. It wasn’t this, however, that had impressed Flo particularly, but the carefree change in him; he seemed so reliant and dependable that all at once she had felt that she wanted to hold his hand and have him look after her. Only, of course, he had not taken any notice of her. She had stood disregarded and seen him go off with five of the eldest boys, and the only thing that she had to be thankful about was that he had ignored Sally Gore and all the other girls as well.
Now the coming of men towards Flo had ended. Instead she was in a weaker flow of office girls and men setting across the bridges towards Barrow and Walney Islands; in the flow but not of it, because all these persons ignored her, passing, talking busily together. Most of the girls were neat and obviously satisfied with themselves, going along with their shoulders slightly swaying and high heels tapping on the smooth, worn macadam. Flo had no idea how different her own manner was; she simply went on, carrying the daffodils, not for show, but as if they were precious. Now she was clear of the buildings and on the first bridge, and a cool wind from off the bay hidden beyond the channel bend flickered the pale petals of her flowers and toyed with the crinkled trumpets. She stopped, facing the wind, looking over the heavy metal balustrade. Immediately beneath by the wharf so that she looked on it as from the top of the mast was a small coaster. The deep hold was nearly empty. Alongside were six railway trucks loaded with new crates, three feet high cubes, and she wondered what was in them and where the vessel would take them. How strange it was, she thought, that she had been at that place so often and seen so many ships and yet she had hardly any idea of where any of them went or of what they took. There was a man sitting side-saddle as it were on the ship’s counter, occasionally sending up a blue curl of smoke from a cherry-wood pipe and gazing down the water, a fatherly kind of a man, and she wished that he had been nearer, then she would have asked where the ship had been and where it had to go to. She felt vaguely sorry that she had not got to know more about the ships before . . . before now when she was leaving them.