My job is easy, but slow.  With a hammer and tacks I fasten four tin mouldings to the four corners of a gilt picture frame.  Twenty-five cents for a hundred is the pay given me, and it takes me half a day to do this many; but my comrades don’t allow me to get discouraged.

“You’re doing well,” a red-haired vis-a-vis calls to me across the table.  And the foreman, who comes often to see how I am getting along, tells me that the next day we are to begin team-work, which pays much better.

The hours are ten a day:  from seven until five thirty, with twenty-five minutes at noon instead of half an hour.  The extra five minutes a day mount up to thirty minutes a week and let us off at five on Saturdays.

The conversation around me leads me to suppose that my companions are not downtrodden in any way, nor that they intend letting work interfere with happiness.  They have in their favour the most blessed of all gifts—­youth.  The tragic faces one meets with are of the women breadwinners whose burdens are overwhelming and of the children in whom physical fatigue arrests development and all possibility of pleasure.  My present team-mates and those along the rest of the room are Americans between fourteen and twenty-four years of age, full of unconscious hope for the future, which is natural in healthy, well-fed youth, taking their work cheerily as a self-imposed task in exchange for which they can have more clothes and more diversions during their leisure hours.

The profitable job given us on the following day is monotonous and dirty, but we net $1.05 each.  There is a mechanical roller which passes before us, carrying at irregular intervals a large sheet of coloured paper covered with glue.  My vis-a-vis and I lay the palms of our right hands on to the glue surface and lift the sheet of paper to its place on the table before us, over a stiff square of bristol board.  The boss of the team fixes the two sheets together with a brush which she manipulates skilfully.  We are making in this way the stiff backs which hold the pictures into their frames.  When we have fallen into the proper swing we finish one hundred sheets every forty-five minutes.  We could work more rapidly, but the sheets are furnished to us at this rate, and it is so comfortable that conversation is not interrupted.  The subjects are the same as elsewhere—­dress, young men, entertainments.  The girls have “beaux” and “steady beaux.”  The expression, “Who is she going with?” means who is her steady beau.  “I’ve got Jim Smith now, but I don’t know whether I’ll keep him,” means that Jim Smith is on trial as a beau and may become a “steady.”  They go to Sunday night subscription dances and arrive Monday morning looking years older than on Saturday, after having danced until early morning.  “There’s nothing so smart for a ball,” the mundane of my team tells us, “as a black skirt and white silk waist.”

About ten in the morning most of us eat a pickle or a bit of cocoanut cake or some titbit from the lunch parcel which is opened seriously at twelve.