“Ten years.”

“And you make?”

“Well, I don’t want to discourage you.” ...

(If Maggie used this expression once she used it a dozen times; it was her pat on the shoulder, her word of cheer before coming ill news.)

“...  I don’t want to discourage you, but it’s slow!  I make about twelve dollars a week.”

“Then I will make four!”

(Four?  Could it be possible I dreamed of such sums at this stage of ignorance!)

“I don’t want to discourage you, but I guess you’d better do housework!”

It was clear, then, that for weeks I was to drop in with the lot of women wage-earners who make under five dollars a week for ten hours a day labour.

“Why don’t you do housework, Maggie?”

“I do.  I get up at five and do all the work of our house, cook breakfast, and clean up before I come to the shop.  I eat dinner here.  When I go home at night I get supper and tidy up!”

My expression as I fell to gumming foxings was not pity for my own fate, as she, generous creature, took it to be.

“After you’ve been here a few years,” she said, “you’ll make more than I do.  I’m not smart.  You’ll beat me.”

Thus with tact she told me bald truth, and yet had not discouraged!

Novel situations, long walks hither and thither through Lynn, stairs climbed, and three hours of intense application to work unusual were tiring indeed.  Nevertheless, as I got into my jacket and put on my hat in the suffocation of the cloak-room I was still under an exhilarating spell.  I belonged, for time never so little, to the giant machine of which the fifth floor of Parsons’ is only an infinitesimal humming, singing part.  I had earned seven cents!  Seven cents of the $4,000,000 paid to Lynn shoe employees were mine.  I had bought the right to one piece of bread by the toil of my unskilled labour.  As I fastened my tippet of common black fur and drew on my woolen gloves, the odour from my glue-and leather-stained hands came pungent to my nostrils.  Friends had said to me:  “Your hands will betray you!” If the girls at my side in Parsons’ thought anything about the matter they made no such sign as they watched my fingers swiftly lose resemblance to those of the leisure class under the use of instruments and materials damning softness and beauty from a woman’s hands.

Yet Maggie had her sensitiveness on this subject.  I remarked once to her:  “I don’t see how you manage to keep your hands so clean.  Mine are twice as black.”  She coloured, was silent for a time, then said:  “I never want anybody to speak to me of my hands.  I’m ashamed of ’em; they used to be real nice, though.”  She held the blunted ends up.  “They’re awful!  I do love a nice hand.”

The cold struck sharp as a knife as I came out of the factory.  Fresh air, insolent with purity, cleanness, unusedness, smiting nostrils, sought lungs filled too long with unwholesome atmosphere.[3]