Silvia was a rose, half-opened ... an exquisite young creature.  Alva was gawky and younger.  She was callow and moulting, flat-footed and long-shanked.  Her face was sallow and full of freckles.

In the long Winter evenings we sat together by the warmth of the kitchen stove, alone, studying our lessons,—­the place given over entirely to us for our school work.

A touch of the hand with either of them, but with Silvia especially, was a superb intoxication, an ecstasy I have never since known.  When all my power of feeling fluttered into my fingers ... and when we kissed, each night, good-night (the girls kissed me because I pretended to be embarrassed, to object to it) our homework somehow done,—­the thought of their kisses was a memory to lie and roll in, for hours, after going to bed.

I would pull away as far as I could from my father, and think luxuriously, awake sometimes till dawn.

* * * * *

I hated school so that I ran away.  For the first time in my life, but by no means my last, I hopped a freight.

I was absent several weeks.

When I returned, weary, and dirty from riding in coal cars, my father was so glad to see me he didn’t whip me.  He was, in fact, a little proud of me.  For he was always boastful of the many miles he had travelled through the various states, as salesman, not many years before.  And after I had bathed, and had put on the new suit which he bought me, I grew talkative about my adventures, too.

I now informed my father that I wanted to go to work.  Which I didn’t so very much.  But anything, if only it was not going to school.  He was not averse to my getting a job.  He took out papers for me, and gave me work under him, in the drying department of the Composite Works.  My wage was three dollars a week.  My task, to hang the thin sheets of composite, cut from three to fifteen hundredths of an inch in thickness, on metal clips to dry.

In the Composite Works I discovered a new world—­the world of factory life.

I liked to be sent to the other departments on errands.  There were whirling wheels and steadily recurring, ever-lapsing belts ... and men and women working and working in thin fine dust, or among a strong smell as of rubbed amber—­the characteristic smell of composite when subjected to friction....

And these men and women were continually joking and jesting and making horse-play at one another’s expense, as rough people in their social unease do.

They seemed part and adjunct to the machines, the workers!  Strong, sturdy, bared forearms flashed regularly like moving, rhythmic shafts ... deft hands clasped and reached, making only necessary movements.

Each department housed a different kind of worker.  In the grinding, squealing, squeaking, buzzing machine shop the men were not mixed with women.

They were alert, well-muscled; their faces were streaked with paleness and a black smutch like dancers made up for a masquerade.  Always they were seeking for a vigorous joke to play on someone.  And, if the trick were perpetrated within the code, the foreman himself enjoyed it, laughing grimly with the “boys.”