As I draw nearer the factory I move with a stream of fellow workers pouring toward the glass cage of the timekeeper.  He greets me and starts me on my upward journey with a wish that I shall not get discouraged, a reminder that the earnest worker always makes a way for herself.

“What will you do about your name?” “What will you do with your hair and your hands?” “How can you deceive people?” These are some of the questions I had been asked by my friends.

Before any one had cared or needed to know my name it was morning of the second day, and my assumed name seemed by that time the only one I had ever had.  As to hair and hands, a half-day’s work suffices for their undoing.  And my disguise is so successful I have deceived not only others but myself.  I have become with desperate reality a factory girl, alone, inexperienced, friendless.  I am making $4.20 a week and spending $3 of this for board alone, and I dread not being strong enough to keep my job.  I climb endless stairs, am given a white cap and an apron, and my life as a factory girl begins.  I become part of the ceaseless, unrelenting mechanism kept in motion by the poor.

The factory I have chosen has been built contemporaneously with reforms and sanitary inspection.  There are clean, well-aired rooms, hot and cold water with which to wash, places to put one’s hat and coat, an obligatory uniform for regular employees, hygienic and moral advantages of all kinds, ample space for work without crowding.

Side by side in rows of tens or twenties we stand before our tables waiting for the seven o’clock whistle to blow.  In their white caps and blue frocks and aprons, the girls in my department, like any unfamiliar class, all look alike.  My first task is an easy one; anybody could do it.  On the stroke of seven my fingers fly.  I place a lid of paper in a tin jar-top, over it a cork; this I press down with both hands, tossing the cover, when done, into a pan.  In spite of myself I hurry; I cannot work fast enough—­I outdo my companions.  How can they be so slow?  I have finished three dozen while they are doing two.  Every nerve, every muscle is offering some of its energy.  Over in one corner the machinery for sealing the jars groans and roars; the mingled sounds of filling, washing, wiping, packing, comes to my eager ears as an accompaniment for the simple work assigned to me.  One hour passes, two, three hours; I fit ten, twenty, fifty dozen caps, and still my energy keeps up.

The forewoman is a pretty girl of twenty.  Her restless eyes, her metallic voice are the messengers who would know all.  I am afraid of her.  I long to please her.  I am sure she must be saying “How well the new girl works.”

Conversation is possible among those whose work has become mechanical.  Twice I am sent to the storeroom for more caps.  In these brief moments my companions volunteer a word of themselves.

“I was out to a ball last night,” the youngest one says.  “I stayed so late I didn’t feel a bit like getting up this morning.”