People who now and then have an attack of conscientious scruples about existences to which they may possibly stand in original relationship, can draw a sigh of relief.  The responsibility is at any rate diminished, as the chances now are that they will be drawn into Labour’s educating wheel; and then, too, the matter is in certain respects carried over into moral territory.

There they sat, the more ripely-developed youth of the town, in rows up in the rooms of the Veyergang firm’s great factory, and minded the whirring shuttles, balls and rollers—­Swedish Lena, and Stina, and Kristofa, and Kalla, and Josefa and Gunda, and all the rest of them.  Had any one asked them about their parents, they would now and then have been hard put to it for an answer.

The conversation went on very busily at the top of the room; it was even continued with nods and glances whenever one or other of the controlling authorities turned his steps in that direction.  They had to gesticulate, nod, talk in a loud voice, but they got on best with their faces close up to one another in all this whizzing, where the band-wheels each whirred away for their little sub-division of power, the boards of the floor quivered and shook with the movement of the engines, and the waterfall outside in the sun, with a thundering and deafening roar, buried the great water-wheel beneath its creamy, powerful splendour.

They were for the most part quite young vagabond girls of from barely sixteen to twenty, who were making the noise up there:  new-comers, more or less, without practice, who were still striving to acquire the knack.  And that was Silla Holman, she with the dark hair, slender and freckled, with heelless slippers and a large spot of paraffine on the front of her dress, who coughed and questioned, and questioned and coughed, while her eyes looked like two little round, black fire-balls, and her weak, flat chest went up and down with the mere exertion of making herself heard.  She sat there among the youngest; her fingers worked among the spools, and now and then she looked up like a bird.

They had got over the angry dispute about Josefa’s new braided jacket.  She need not try to persuade any one that she had got the money from her stepmother; no, let any one who liked believe that, but neither Gunda nor Jakobina did!  Then Kristofa had related her wonderful adventure of last Sunday—­she was always passing through remarkable occurrences, most wonderfully interesting, if not true to quite a corresponding degree, in which fine ladies and gentlemen played the principal parts, and she chanced to be the initiated one.

And now the conversation had turned upon something so interesting that Silla listened with both her ears.  There was to be dancing on Sunday evening up at the Letvindt, and the talk was of handkerchiefs, bows, and finery—­which some possessed and others had to borrow—­and of who danced best and treated most liberally.  Kristofa was able to inform them that there was to be a violin and a clarionet, and that both students and ordinary people and ships’ officers were to be there!