“That’s nothing,” another retorts.  “There’s hardly an evening we don’t have company at the house, music or somethin’; I never get enough rest.”

And on my second trip the pale creature with me says: 

“I’m in deep mourning.  My mother died last Friday week.  It’s awful lonely without her.  Seems as though I’d never get over missing her.  I miss her dreadful.  Perhaps by and by I’ll get used to it.”

“Oh, no, you won’t,” the answer comes from a girl with short skirts.  “You’ll never get used to it.  My ma’s been dead eight years next month and I dreamt about her all last night.  I can’t get her out o’ me mind.”

Born into dirt and ugliness, disfigured by effort, they have the same heritage as we:  joys and sorrows, grief and laughter.  With them as with us gaiety is up to its old tricks, tempting from graver rivals, making duty an alien.  Grief is doing her ugly work:  hollowing round cheeks, blackening bright eyes, putting her weight of leaden loneliness in hearts heretofore light with youth.

When I have fitted 110 dozen tin caps the forewoman comes and changes my job.  She tells me to haul and load up some heavy crates with pickle jars.  I am wheeling these back and forth when the twelve o’clock whistle blows.  Up to that time the room has been one big dynamo, each girl a part of it.  With the first moan of the noon signal the dynamo comes to life.  It is hungry; it has friends and favourites—­news to tell.  We herd down to a big dining-room and take our places, five hundred of us in all.  The newspaper bundles are unfolded.  The menu varies little:  bread and jam, cake and pickles, occasionally a sausage, a bit of cheese or a piece of stringy cold meat.  In ten minutes the repast is over.  The dynamo has been fed; there are twenty minutes of leisure spent in dancing, singing, resting, and conversing chiefly about young men and “sociables.”

At 12:30 sharp the whistle draws back the life it has given.  I return to my job.  My shoulders are beginning to ache.  My hands are stiff, my thumbs almost blistered.  The enthusiasm I had felt is giving way to a numbing weariness.  I look at my companions now in amazement.  How can they keep on so steadily, so swiftly?  Cases are emptied and refilled; bottles are labeled, stamped and rolled away; jars are washed, wiped and loaded, and still there are more cases, more jars, more bottles.  Oh! the monotony of it, the never-ending supply of work to be begun and finished, begun and finished, begun and finished!  Now and then some one cuts a finger or runs a splinter under the flesh; once the mustard machine broke—­and still the work goes on, on, on!  New girls like myself, who had worked briskly in the morning, are beginning to loiter.  Out of the washing-tins hands come up red and swollen, only to be plunged again into hot dirty water.  Would the whistle never blow?  Once I pause an instant, my head dazed and weary, my ears strained to bursting with the deafening noise.  Quickly a voice whispers in my ear:  “You’d better not stand there doin’ nothin’.  If she catches you she’ll give it to you.”