“Jove!  Watch how her hands fly!” said Hugo, with manlike interest for processes, things done.  “Look, Carlisle.”

Carlisle looked dutifully.  It was in the order of things that she should bring Hugo to the Works, and that, being here, he should take charge of her.  But, unconsciously, she soon turned her back to the busy machine, impelled by the mounting interest she felt to see bunching, not in detail, but in the large.

Downstairs the workers had been negroes; here they were white women, a different matter.  But Cally had a closer association than that, in the girl she had just been talking to, Corinne, who had worked three years in this room.  It wasn’t so easy to preserve the valuable detached point of view, when you actually knew one of the people....

“Three cents a hundred,” said MacQueen’s rugged voice.

There was a fine brown dust in the air of the teeming room, and the sickening smell of new tobacco.  Not a window in the place was open, and the strong steam heat seemed almost overwhelming.  The women had now been at it for near nine hours.  Damp, streaked faces, for the most part pale and somewhat heavy, turned incessantly toward the large wall-clock at one end of the room.  Eyes looked sidewise upon the elegant visitors, but then the flying fingers were off again, for time is strictly money with piecework ...  How could they stand being so crowded, and couldn’t they have any air?

“Oh, five thousand a day—­plenty of them.”

“Five thousand!—­how do they do it?”

“We had a girl do sixty-five hundred.  She’s quit ...  Here’s one down here ain’t bad.”

The trio moved down the line of machines, past soiled, busy backs.  Close on their left was the double row of tables, where the hurrying “wrappers” sat like sardines.  Cally now saw that these were not women at all, but young girls, like Corinne; girls mostly younger than she herself, some very much younger.  Only they seemed to be girls with a difference, girls who had somehow lost their girlhood.  The rather nauseating atmosphere which enveloped them, the way they were huddled together yet never ceased to drive on their tasks, the slatternly uncorseted figures, stolid faces and furtive glances; by something indefinable in their situation, these girls seemed to have been degraded and dehumanized, to have lost something more precious than virtue.

Yet some of them were quite pretty, beneath dust and fatigue; one, with a quantity of crinkly auburn hair, was very pretty, indeed.  The girl Corinne, after three years here, was both pretty and possessed of a certain delicacy; a delicacy which forbade her to tell Mr. Heth’s daughter what she really thought about the Works.  For that must have been it....

“This ‘un can keep three wrappers pretty busy when she’s feelin’ good.  Can’t yer, Miller?...  Ye’ll see the wrappers there, in a minute.”

This ’un, or Miller, was a tall, gaunt, sallow girl, who handled her machine with the touch of a master, eliminating every superfluous move and filling a form of a dozen rough cheroots quickly enough to take a visitor’s breath away.  No doubt it was very instructive to see how fast cheroots could be made.  However, the stirring interest of the daughter of the Works was not for mechanical skill.