Cally stood with a daintily scented handkerchief at her nostrils, painfully drinking in the origins of the Heth fortune.  The safeguarding sense of irresponsibility ebbed, do what she might.  Well she knew that this place could not be so bad as it seemed to her; for then her father would not have let it be so.  For her to seem to disapprove of papa’s business methods was mere silly impertinence, on top of the disloyalty of it.  But none of the sane precepts she had had two weeks to think out seemed to make any answer to the disturbing sensations she felt rising, like a sickness, within her....

Her sense was of something polluting at the spring of her life.  Here was the soil that she was rooted in, and the soil was not clean.  It might be business, it might be right; but no argument could make it agreeable to feel that the money she wore upon her back at this moment was made in this malodorous place, by these thickly crowded girls....  Was it in such thoughts that grew this sense of some personal relation of herself with her father’s most unpleasant bunching-room?  Was it for such reasons that V. Vivian had asked her that day at the Settlement why didn’t she go to the Works some day?...

She heard Hugo’s voice, with a note of admiration for visible efficiency:  “How do they keep it up at this clip nine hours?”

“Got to do it, or others will.”

“You expect each machine to produce so much, I suppose?”

And Cally, so close to her lordly lover that her arm brushed his, was seeing for the first time in her life what people meant when they threw bricks at papa on election night, or felt the strong necessity of attacking him in the papers.  By processes that were less mental than emotional, even physical, she was driven further down a well-trod path and stood dimly confronting the outlines of a vast interrogation....  What particular human worth had she, Cally Heth, that the womanhood of these lower-class sisters should be sapped that she might wear silk next her skin, and be bred to appeal to the highly cultivated tastes of a Canning?...

If there are experiences which permanently extend the frontiers of thought, it was not in this girl’s power to recognize one of them closing down on her now.  But she did perceive, by the growing commotion within, that she had made a great mistake to come to this place....

“Now, here’s wrapping,” said MacQueen.  “Hand work, you see.”

But his employer’s daughter, it appeared, had seen enough of cigar-making for one day.  At that moment she touched Canning’s well-tailored arm.

“Let’s go....  It’s—­stifling here.”

Hugo, just turning from the bunching-machine, regarded her faintly horrified face with some amusement.  And Carlisle saw that he was amused.

“I was wondering,” said he, “how long your sociology would survive this air....”

The peep was meant to end there, and should have done so.  But unluckily, at just that juncture, there came a small diversion.  The gaunt girl Miller, by whose machine the little party stood, took it into her head to keep at it no longer.