n's swell."

But the elderly woman brought another interruption. She dropped her iron
on the shirtwaist, clutched at the board, fumbled it, caved in at the
knees and hips, and like a half-empty sack collapsed on the floor, her
long shriek rising in the pent room to the acrid smell of scorching
cloth. The women at the boards near to her scrambled, first, to the hot
iron to save the cloth, and then to her, while the forewoman hurried
belligerently down the aisle. The women farther away continued
unsteadily at their work, losing movements to the extent of a minute's
set-back to the totality of the efficiency of the fancy-starch room.

"Enough to kill a dog," the girl muttered, thumping her iron down on its
rest with reckless determination. "Workin' girls' life ain't what it's
cracked up. Me to quit--that's what I'm comin' to."

"Mary!" Saxon uttered the other's name with a reproach so profound that
she was compelled to rest her own iron for emphasis and so lose a dozen
movements.

Mary flashed a half-frightened look across.

"I didn't mean it, Saxon," she whimpered. "Honest, I didn't. I wouldn't
never go that way. But I leave it to you, if a day like this don't get
on anybody's nerves. Listen to that!"

The stricken woman, on her back, drumming her heels on the floor, was
shrieking persistently and monotonously, like a mechanical siren. Two
women, clutching her under the arms, were dragging her down the aisle.
She drummed and shrieked the length of it. The door opened, and a vast,
muffled roar of machinery burst in; and in the roar of it the drumming
and the shrieking were drowned ere the door swung shut. Remained of the
episode only the scorch of cloth drifting ominously through the air.

"It's sickenin'," said Mary.

And thereafter, for a long time, the many irons rose and fell, the pace
of the room in no wise diminished; while the forewoman strode the
aisles with a threatening eye for incipient breakdown and hysteria.
Occasionally an ironer lost the stride for an instant, gasped or sighed,
then caught it up again with weary determination. The long summer day
waned, but not the heat, and under the raw flare of electric light the
work went on.

By nine o'clock the first women began to go home. The mountain of fancy
starch had been demolished--all save the few remnants, here and there,
on the boards, where the ironers still labored.

Saxon finished ahead of Mary, at whose board she paused on the way out.

"Sat