There is more honour than courtesy in the code of etiquette.  Commands are given curtly; the slightest injustice is resented; each man for himself in work, but in trouble all for the one who is suffering.  No bruise or cut or burn is too familiar a sight to pass uncared for.

It is their common sufferings, their common effort that unites them.

When I have become expert in the corking art I am raised to a better table, with a bright boy, and a girl who is dignified and indifferent with the indifference of those who have had too much responsibility.  She never hurries; the work slips easily through her fingers.  She keeps a steady bearing over the morning’s ups and downs.  Under her load of trials there is something big in the steady way she sails.

“Used to hard work?” she asks me.

“Not much,” I answer; “are you?”

“Oh, yes.  I began at thirteen in a bakery.  I had a place near the oven and the heat overcame me.”

Her shoulders are bowed, her chest is hollow.

“Looking for a boarding place near the factory, I hear,” she continues.

“Yes.  You live at home, I suppose.”

“Yes.  There’s four of us:  mamma, papa, my sister and myself.  Papa’s blind.”

“Can’t he work?”

“Oh, yes, he creeps to his job every morning, and he’s got so much experience he kind o’ does things by instinct.”

“Does your mother work?”

“Oh, my, no.  My sister’s an invalid.  She hasn’t been out o’ the door for three years.  She’s got enlargement of the heart and consumption, too, I guess; she ‘takes’ hemorrhages.  Sometimes she has twelve in one night.  Every time she coughs the blood comes foaming out of her mouth.  She can’t lie down.  I guess she’d die if she lay down, and she gets so tired sittin’ up all night.  She used to be a tailoress, but I guess her job didn’t agree with her.”

“How many checks have we got,” I ask toward the close of the day.

“Thirteen,” Ella answers.

“An unlucky number,” I venture, hoping to arouse an opinion.

“Are you superstitious?” she asks, continuing to twist tin caps on the pickle jars.  “I am.  If anything’s going to happen I can’t help having presentiments, and they come true, too.”

Here is a mystic, I thought; so I continued: 

“And what about dreams?”

“Oh!” she cried.  “Dreams!  I have the queerest of anybody!”

I was all attention.

“Why, last night,” she drew near to me, and spoke slowly, “I dreamed that mamma was drunk, and that she was stealing chickens!”

Such is the imagination of this weary worker.