gic spell
in their voices as they talked together; the sounds they made had the
cadence of the wind in the trees, the running of water, the song of
birds: they echoed unconsciously the caressing melodies of nature. My
factory companions drew their vocal inspiration from the bedlam of
civilization, the rasping and pounding of machinery, the din which they
must out-din to be heard.

For the two days following my first experience I am unable to resume
work. Fatigue has swept through my blood like a fever. Every bone and
joint has a clamouring ache. I pass the time visiting other factories
and hunting for a place to board in the neighbourhood of the pickling
house. At the cork works they do not need girls; at the cracker company
I can get a job, but the hours are longer, the advantages less than
where I am; at the broom factory they employ only men. I decide to
continue with tin caps and pickle jars.

My whole effort now is to find a respectable boarding-house. I start
out, the thermometer near zero, the snow falling. I wander and ask,
wander and ask. Up and down the black streets running parallel and at
right angles with the factory I tap and ring at one after another of the
two-story red-brick houses. More than half of them are empty, tenantless
during the working hours. What hope is there for family life near the
hearth which is abandoned at the factory's first call? The sociableness,
the discipline, the division of responsibility make factory work a
dangerous rival to domestic care. There is something in the modern
conditions of labour which act magnetically upon American girls,
impelling them to work not for bread alone, but for clothes and finery
as well. Each class in modern society knows a menace to its homes:
sport, college education, machinery--each is a factor in the gradual
transformation of family life from a united domestic group to a
collection of individuals with separate interests and aims outside the
home.

I pursue my search. It is the dinner hour. At last a narrow door opens,
letting a puff of hot rank air blow upon me as I stand in the vestibule
questioning: "Do you take boarders?"

The woman who answers stands with a spoon in her hand, her eyes fixed
upon a rear room where a stove, laden with frying-pans, glows and
sputters.

"Come in," she says, "and get warm."

I walk into a front parlour with furniture that evidently serves
domestic as well as social purposes. There is a profusion of white