in a manner of both the spirit and the grosser elements of existence, its higher qualities and its sordid mechanism, like man himself, had the best of it.  The swart arms of the workmen flew at their appointed tasks, they fed those unsatisfied maws, the factory vibrated with the heavy thud of the cutting-machines like a pulse, the racks with shoes in different stages of completion trundled from one department to another, propelled by men with tense arms and doggedly bent heads.

Ellen worked with the rest, but she was one of the few whose brain could travel faster than her hands.  She thought as she worked, for her muscles did not retard her mind.  She was composed of two motions, one within the other, and the central motion was so swift that it seemed still.

Ed Flynn came down the room and bent over her.

“Good-morning,” he said.  He was too gayly confident to be entirely respectful, but he had always a timidity of bearing which sat oddly upon him before Ellen.  He looked half boldly, half wistfully at her fair face, and challenged her with gay eyes, which had in their depths a covert seriousness.

Ellen stood between Abby Atkins and Sadie Peel at her work.  Sadie Peel turned on the foreman coquettishly and said, “You’d better go an’ talk to Mamie Brady, she’s got on a new blue bow on her red hair.  Why don’t you give her some better work than tying those old shoes?  Here she’s been workin’ in this shop two years.  You needn’t come shinin’ round Ellen an’ me!  We don’t want you.”

Flynn colored angrily and shot a vicious glance at the girl.

“It’s a pretty hard storm,” he said to Ellen, as if the other girl had not spoken.

“You needn’t pretend you don’t hear me, Ed Flynn,” called out the girl.  Her cheap finery was in full force that morning, not a lock of her brown hair was unstudied in its arrangement, and she was as conscious of her pose before her machine as if she had been on the stage.  She knew just how her slender waist and the graceful slope of her shoulders appeared to the foreman, and her voice, in spite of its gay rallying and audacity, was wheedling.

Flynn caught hold of her shoulders, round and graceful under her flannel blouse, and shook her, half in anger, half in weakness.

“You shut up, you witch,” said he.  Then he turned to Ellen again, and his whole manner and expression changed.

“I’m sorry about that new list,” he said, very low, in her ear.  Ellen never looked at him, and did not make a motion as if she heard.

“It’s a hard storm,” the foreman said again, almost appealingly.

“Yes, it is very hard,” replied Ellen, slipping another shoe under the needles.

“What on earth ails you this morning, Ellen Brewster?” Sadie Peel said to her, when the foreman had gone.  “You look queer and act queer.”

“Ellen ain’t in the habit of joking with Ed Flynn,” said Abby Atkins, on the other side, with sarcastic emphasis.