The first day I had a touch of pride in getting easily ahead of the new girl who started in when I did.  From my machine I could see only the back of her head; it was shaking disapproval at every stroke she made and had to make over again.  She had a mass of untidy hair and a slouchy skirt that slipped out from her belt in the back.  If not actually stupid, she was slow, and the foreman and the girl who took turns teaching her exchanged glances, meaning that they were exhausting their patience and would readily give up the job.  I was pleased at being included in these glances, and had a miserable moment of vanity at lunch time when the old girls, the habitues, came after me to eat with them.  The girl with the untidy hair and the long skirt sat quite by her self.  Without unfolding her newspaper bundle, she took bites of things from it, as though she were a little ashamed of her lunch.  My moment of vanity had passed.  I went over to her, not knowing whether her appearance meant a slipshod nature or extreme poverty.  As we were both new girls, there was no indiscretion in my direct question: 

“Like your job?”

I could not understand what she answered, so I continued:  “Ever worked before?”

She opened her hands and held them out to me.  In the palm of one there was a long scar that ran from wrist to forefinger.  Two nails had been worn off below the quick and were cracked through the middle.  The whole was gloved in an iron callous, streaked with black.

“Does that look like work?” was her response.  It was almost impossible to hear what she said.  Without a palate, she forced the words from her mouth in a strange monotone.  She was one of nature’s monstrous failures.  Her coarse, opaque skin covered a low forehead and broad, boneless nose; her teeth were crumbling with disease, and into her full lower lip some sharp tool had driven a double scar.  She kept her hand over her mouth when she talked, and except for this movement of self-consciousness her whole attitude was one of resignation and humility.  Her eyes in their dismal surroundings lay like clear pools in a swamp’s midst reflecting blue sky.

“What was you doing to get your hands like that?” I asked.

“Tipping shoe-laces.  I had to quit, ’cause they cut the pay down.  I could do twenty-two gross in a day, working until eight o’clock, and I didn’t care how hard I worked so long as I got good pay—­$9 a week.  But the employer’d been a workman himself, and they’re the worst kind.  He cut me down to $4 a week, so I quit.”

“Do you live home?”

“Yes.  I give all I make to my mother, and she gives me my clothes and board.  Almost anywhere I can make $7 a week, and I feel when I earn that much like I was doing right.  But it’s hard to work and make nothing.  I’m slow to learn,” she smiled at me, covering her mouth with her hand, “but I’ll get on to it by and by and go as fast as any one; only I’m not very strong.”