“We’ve got plenty of work for a good-looking woman like you,” he said with significance, and took pains to place her within his sight.

The yarn has come in, and I return to my part of the mill; Maggie flies to her spools and leaves me to seek my distant place far away from her.  I set my work in order; whilst my back is turned some girl possesses herself of my hand-harness.  Mine was a new one, and the one she leaves for me is broken.  This delays, naturally, and the overseer, after proving to his satisfaction that I am hampered, gets me a new one and I set to work.

Many of the older hands come without breakfast, and a little later tin pails or paper parcels appear.  These operatives crouch down in a Turkish fashion at the machines’ sides and take a hasty mouthful of their unwholesome, unpleasant-looking food, eating with their fingers more like animals than human beings.  By eight the full steam power is on, to judge by the swift turning, the strong resistance of the spools.  Not one of the women near me but is degrading to look upon and odourous to approach.  These creatures, ill clad, with matted, frowsy hair and hands that look as though they had never, never been washed, smell like the byre.  As for the children, I must pass them by in this recital.  The tiny, tiny children!  The girls are profane, contentious, foul-mouthed.  There is much partisanship and cliqueism; you can tell it by the scowls and the low, insulting words as an enemy passes.  To protect the hair from the flying pieces of cotton the more particular women, and oftentimes children as well, wear felt hats pulled down well over the eyes.  The cotton, indeed, thistledown-like, flies without cessation through the air—­spins off from the spools; it rises and floats, falling on the garments and in the hair, entering the nostrils and throat and lungs.  I repeat, the expectoration, the coughing and the throat-cleaning is constant.  Over there two girls have taken advantage of a wait for yarn to go to sleep on the floor; their heads are pillowed on each others’ shoulders; they rest against a cotton bale.  Maggie wanders over to me to see “how you-all is gettin’ on.”  “Tired?” “Well, I reckon I am.  Thank God we get out in a little while now.”

* * * * *

One afternoon I went up to the loft to rest a few moments before going to the mill.  Mrs. White was sitting on her bed, a slender figure in the blue-checked wrapper she always wore.  Her head was close to the window, her silhouette in the light, pale and slender.  “I wa’n’t sick when I come hyar, but them mills!  They’s suttinly tew hyard on a woman!  Weave-room killed me, I guess.  I couldn’t hyar at all when I come out and scarcely could stan’ on ma feet when I got home.  Tew tyred to eat, tew; and the water hyar is regularly pisen; hev you-all seen it?  It’s all colours.  Doctor done come to see me; ain’t helpin’ me any; ’pears like he-all ain’t goin’ to come no mo’!”