She had the monotony of
an old child, one who questions constantly but who has passed the age
when learning is possible. The butcher's death had opened new
possibilities. After a period of respectful mourning, she had set out,
against the wishes of her family, with a vague, romantic hope that was
expressed not so much in words as in a certain picture hat trimmed with
violet chiffon and carried carefully in a bandbox by itself, a new,
crisp sateen petticoat, and a golf skirt she had sat up until one
o'clock to finish the night before she left home. It was inevitable that
the butcher's widow should be disappointed. There was too much grim
reality in ten-hour days spent over a machine in the stifling mill room
to feed a sentimentalist whose thirty odd years were no accomplice to
romance. She grumbled and complained. Secret dissatisfaction preyed upon
her. She was somewhat exasperated at the rest of us, who worked cheerily
and with no _arriere pensee_. At the end of the first week the picture
hat was tucked away in the bandbox; the frou-frou of the sateen
petticoat and the daring swish of the golf skirt were packed up, like
the remains of a bubble that had reflected the world in its brilliant
sides one moment and the next lay a little heap of soap-suds. She had
gone behind in her work steadily at the factory; she was not making more
than sixty cents a day. She left us and went back to do housework in
Batavia.

My other roommate was of the Madonna type. In our class she would have
been called an invalid. Her hands trembled, she was constantly in pain,
and her nerves were rebellious without frequent doses of bromide. We
found her one night lying in a heap on the bed, her moans having called
us to her aid. It was the pain in her back that never stopped, the ache
between her shoulders, the din of the machines in her ears, the
vibration, the strain of incessant hours upon her tired nerves. We fixed
her up as best we could, and the next day at quarter before seven she
was, like the rest of us, bending over her machine again. She had been a
school-teacher, after passing the necessary examination at the Geneseo
Normal School. She could not say why school-teaching was uncongenial to
her, except that the children "made her nervous" and she wanted to try
factory work. Her father was a cheese manufacturer up in the Genesee
Valley. She might have lived quietly at home, but she disliked to be a
dependent. She was of the mystic, sentimen