r-hour rest, like an exhausted prizefighter.

That was one of the great days in Mamise's history, for she was
permitted to assist in the achievement, and she was not entirely
grateful to Davidge for suppressing the publication of her name
alongside Sutton's. Her photograph appeared with his in many of the
supplements, but nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss
Webling in the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at Sutton's elbow.
The publication of her photograph as an English belle had made
history for her, in that it brought Jake Nuddle into her life; but
this picture had no follow-up except in her own pride.

This rapture, however, long postdated her first adventure into the
shipyard. That grim period of eight hours was an alternation of shame,
awkwardness, stupidity, failure, fatigue, and despair.

She did not even wash up for lunch, but picked her fodder from her
pail with her companions. She smoked a convivial cigarette with the
gang and was proud as a boy among grown-ups. She even wanted to be
tough and was tempted to use ugly words in a swaggering pride.

But after her lunch it was almost impossible for her to get up and go
back to her task, and she would have fainted from sheer weariness
except that she had forsworn such luxuries as swoons.

The final whistle found her one entire neuralgia. The unending use of
the same muscles, the repetition of the same rhythmic series, the
cranium-shattering clatter of all the riveting-guns, the anxiety to be
sure of each successive rivet, quite burned her out. And she learned
that the reward for this ordeal was, according to the minimum
wage-scale adopted by the Emergency Fleet Corporation, thirty cents an
hour for eight hours, with a ten-per-cent. increase for a six-day
week. This would amount to all of two dollars and sixty-four cents for
the day, and fifteen dollars for the week!

It was munificent for a passer-boy, but it was ruinous for a young
woman of independent fortune and an ambition to look her best. She
gasped with horror when she realized the petty reward for such
prolonged torment. She was too weary to contrast the wage with the
prices of food, fuel, and clothing. While wages climbed expenses
soared.

She understood as never before, and never after, why labor is
discontent and why it is so easily stirred to rebellion, why it feels
itself the exploited slave of imaginary tyrants. She went to bed at
eight and slept in the deeps of sweat-earned repose