You would know from this that Tessie was not a particularly deft worker.  Her big-knuckled fingers were cleverer at turning out a shirt waist or retrimming a hat.  Hers were what are known as handy hands, but not sensitive.  It takes a light and facile set of fingers to fit pallet and arbour and fork together:  close work and tedious.  Seated on low benches along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top, the girls worked with pincers and gas flame, screwing together the three tiny parts of the watch’s anatomy that was their particular specialty.  Each wore a jeweller’s glass in one eye.  Tessie had worked at the watch factory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eye socket had given her the slightly hollow-eyed appearance peculiar to experienced watchmakers.  It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her, somehow, a spiritual look which made her diablerie all the more piquant.

Tessie wasn’t always witty, really.  But she had achieved a reputation for wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts.  Nap Ballou, the foreman, never left the escapement room without a little shiver of nervous apprehension—­a feeling justified by the ripple of suppressed laughter that went up and down the long tables.  He knew that Tessie Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher’s back is turned, had directed one of her sure shafts at him.

Ballou, his face darkling, could easily have punished her.  Tessie knew it.  But he never did, or would.  She knew that, too.  Her very insolence and audacity saved her.

“Some day,” Ballou would warn her, “you’ll get too gay, and then you’ll find yourself looking for a job.”

“Go on—­fire me,” retorted Tessie, “and I’ll meet you in Lancaster”—­a form of wit appreciated only by watchmakers.  For there is a certain type of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer.  Restless, ne’er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to factory through the chain of watchmaking towns:  Springfield, Trenton, Waltham, Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa.  Usually expert, always unreliable, certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his kind.  The steady worker had a mingled admiration and contempt for him.  He, in turn, regarded the other as a stick-in-the-mud.  Nap wore his cap on one side of his curly head, and drank so evenly and steadily as never to be quite drunk and never strictly sober.  He had slender, sensitive fingers like an artist’s or a woman’s, and he knew the parts of that intricate mechanism known as a watch from the jewel to the finishing room.  It was said he had a wife or two.  Forty-six, good-looking in a dissolute sort of way, possessing the charm of the wanderer, generous with his money, it was known that Tessie’s barbs were permitted to prick him without retaliation because Tessie herself appealed to his errant fancy.

When the other girls teased her about this obvious state of affairs something fine and contemptuous welled up in her.  “Him!  Why, say, he ought to work in a pickle factory instead of a watch works.  All he needs is a little dill and a handful of grape leaves to make him good eatin’ as a relish.”