At the different doors of the mill we part.  He is not unconscious of my fellowship with him, that I feel and know.  A kindling light has come across his face.  “Good luck to you!” I bid him, and he lifts his head and his bowed shoulders and with something like warmth replies, “I hope you-all will have good luck, tew.”

As we come into the spooling-room from the hot air without the mill seems cold.  I go over to a green box destined for the refuse of the floors and sit down, waiting for work.  On this day I am to have my own “side”—­I am a full-fledged spooler.  Excelsior has gotten us all out of our beds before actual daylight, but that does not mean we are to have a chance to begin our money-making piece-work job at once!  “Thar ain’t likely to be no yarn for an hour to-day,” Maggie tells me.  She is no less dirty than yesterday, or less smelly, but also she is no less kind.

“I reckon you-all are goin’ to make a remarkable spooler,” she cheers me on.  “You’ll get tired out at first, but then I gets tired, tew, right along, only it ain’t the same kind—­it’s not so sharp.”  Her distinction is clever.

Across the room at one of the “drawing-in frames” I see the figure of an unusally pretty girl with curly dark hair.  She bends to her job in front of the frame she runs; it has the effect of tapestry, of that work with which women of another—­oh, of quite another class—­amuse their leisure, with which they kill their time.  “Drawing-in,"[8] although a sitting job, is considered to be a back-breaker.  The girls are ambitious at this work; they make good wages.  They sit close to their frames, bent over, for twelve hours out of the day.  This girl whom I see across the floor of the Excelsior is an object to rest the eyes upon; she is a beauty.  There is not much beauty of any kind or description in sight.  Maggie has noticed her esthetic effect.  “You-all seen that girl; she’s suttenly prob’ly am peart.”

  [Footnote 8:  A good drawer-in makes $1.25 a day.]

She is a new hand from a distance.  This is her first day.  What miserable chance has brought her here?  If she stays the mill will claim her body and soul.  The overseer has marked her out; he hovers in the part of the room where she works.  She has colour and her difference to her pale companions is marked.  Excelsior will not leave those roses unwithered.  I can foretell the change as yellow unhealthfulness creeps upon her cheeks and the red forever goes.  There are no red cheeks here, not one.  She has chosen a sitting-down job thinking it easier.  I saw her lean back, put her hands around her waist and rest, or try to, after she has bent four hours over her close task.  I go over to her.

“They say it’s awful hard on the eyes, but they tell me, too, that I’ll be a remarkable fine hand.”

I saw her apply for work, and saw, too, the man’s face as he looked at her when she asked:  “Got any work?”