The hours, from one to three went fairly well, but by 3:30 I was tired out, my fingers had grown wooden with fatigue, glue-pot and folding-line, board, hammer and awl had grown indistinct.  It was hard-to continue.  The air stifled.  Odours conspired together.  Oil, leather, glue (oh, that to-heaven-smelling glue!), tobacco smoke, humanity.

* * * * *

Maggie asked me, “How old do I look?” I gave her thirty.  Twenty-five it seemed she was.  In guessing the next girl’s age no better luck.  “It’s this,” Maggie nodded to the workroom; “it takes it out of you!  Just you wait till you’ve worked ten years in Lynn.”

Ten years!  Heaven forbid!  Already I could have rushed from the factory, shaken its dust from my feet, and with hands over ears shut out the horrid din that inexorably cried louder than human speech.

Everything we said was shrieked in the friendly ear bent close.

Although Maggie McGowan was curious about me, in posing her questions she was courtesy itself.

“Say,” to her neighbour, “where do you think Miss Ballard’s from?  Paris!”

My neighbour once-removed leaned forward to stare at me.  “My, but that’s a change to Lynn!  Ain’t it?  Now don’t you think you’ll miss it?”

She fell to work again, and said after a little:  “Paris!  Why, that’s like a dream.  Is it like real places?  I can’t never guess what it is like!”

The girl at the machine next mine had an ear like a sea-shell, a skin of satin.  Her youth was bound, strong shoulders already stooped, chest fast narrowing.  At 7 A.M. she came:  albeit fresh, pale still and wan; rest of the night too short a preparation for the day’s work.  By three in the afternoon she was flushed, by five crimson.  She threw her hands up over her head and exclaimed:  “My back’s broke, and I’ve only made thirty-five cents to-day.”

Maggie McGowan (indicating me):  “Here’s a girl who’s had the misfortune never to work in a shoe-shop.”

“Misfortune? You don’t mean that!”

Maggie:  “Well, I guess I don’t!  If I didn’t make a joke now and then I’d jump into the river!”

She sat close to me patiently directing my clumsy fingers.

“Why do you speak so strongly?  ‘Jump into the river!’ That’s saying a lot!”

“I am sick of the shoe-shops.”

“How long have you been at this work?”

“Ten years.  When you have worked ten years in Lynn you will be sick of the shops.”

I was sick of the shops, and I had not worked ten years.  And for my hard-toiling future, such as she imagined that it would be, I could see that she pitied me.  Once, supposing that since I am so green and so ill-clad, and so evidently bent on learning my trade the best I knew, she asked me in a voice quick with sisterhood: 

“Say, are you hungry?”

“No, no, no.”

“You’ll be all right!  No American girl need to starve in America.”