“Oh, exactly!...  For one thing, I’d recommend a ventilator or two, shouldn’t you?”

She felt just a little foolish.  She also felt out of her element, incidental, irresponsible, and genuinely relieved.  Still, through this jumble of feelings she had not forgotten that they were yet to see that part of the Works which she had specially come to peep at....

Progress upward was by means of a most primitive elevator, nothing but an open platform of bare boards, which Mr. MacQueen worked with one hand, and which interestingly pushed up the floor above as one ascended.  As they rose by this quaint device, Carlisle said: 

“Is this next the bunching-room, Mr. MacQueen?”

“It is, Miss.”

“Bunching-room!” echoed Hugo, with satiric admiration.  “You are an expert....”

The lift-shaft ran in one corner of the long building.  Debarking on the third floor, the visitors had to step around a tall, shining machine, not to mention two workmen who had evidently just landed it.  Several other machines stood loosely grouped here, all obviously new and not yet in place.

Hugo, pointing with his stick, observed:  “Clearing in new floor-space, I see.”

MacQueen nodded.  “Knocked out a cloak-room.  Our fight here’s for space.  Profits get smaller all the time....”

“H’m....  You figured the strain, I suppose.  Your floor looks weak.”

“Oh, it’ll stand it,” said the man, shortly.  “This way.”

Carlisle wondered if the weak floor was what her friend Vivian had meant when he said, in his extreme way, that the Works might fall down some day.  She recalled that she had thought the building looked rather ricketty, that day last year.  But these thoughts hardly entered her mind before the sight of her eyes knocked them out.  The visitors squeezed around the new machines, and, doing so, stepped full into the bunching-room.  And the girl saw in one glance that this was the strangest, the most interesting room she had ever seen in her life.

Her first confused sense was only of an astonishing mass of dirty white womanhood.  The thick hot room seemed swarming with women, alive and teeming with women, women tumbling all over each other wherever the eye turned.  Tall clacking machines ran closely around the walls of the room, down the middle stood a double row of tables; and at each machine, and at every possible place at the tables, sat a woman crowded upon a woman, and another and another.

Dirt, noise, heat, and smell:  women, women, women.  Conglomeration of human and inhuman such as the eyes of the refined seldom look upon....  Was this, indeed, the pleasantest place to work in town?...

“Bunchin’ and wrappin’,” said MacQueen.  “Filler’s fed in from that basin on top.  She slips in the binder—­machine rolls ’em together....  Ye can see here.”

They halted by one of the bunching-machines, and saw the parts dexterously brought together into the crude semblance of the product, saw the embryo cigars thrust into wooden forms which would shape them yet further for their uses in a world asmoke....