t _look_ at it,
don't _bodder wid_ it--jus' t'row it in dere faces and made dem do it
over again! It's not like de old days no more!" (Whatever he meant by
that.) So--there was your dress, "ready-made."

Such used to be the entire factory, adding the two office girls; the
model, who was wont to run around our part of the world now and then
in a superior fashion, clad in a scanty pale-pink-satin petticoat
which came just below her knees and an old gray-and-green sweater;
plus various male personages, full of business and dressed in their
best. Goodness knows what all they did do to keep the wheels of
industry running--perhaps they were salesmen. They had the general
appearance of earning at least ten to twenty thousand dollars a year.
It may possibly have risen as high as two thousand.

And Peters--who was small though grown, and black, and who cleaned up
with a fearful dust and snitched lead pencils if you left them around.

At present, in addition, there were the sixteen crochet beaders,
because crochet beading is stylish in certain quarters--this
"department" newly added just prior to my arrival. But before the
beaders could begin work the goods had to be stamped, and before they
could be stamped Mr. Rogers (he was middle-aged and a dear and an
Italian and his name wasn't "Rogers," but some unpronounceable thing
the Germans couldn't get, so it just naturally evolved into something
that began with the same letter which they could pronounce) had to
concoct a design. He worked in the cage at a raised end of the
cutting table. He pricked the pattern through paper with a machine, at
a small table outside by the beaders, that was always piled high with
a mess of everything from spools to dresses, which Mr. Rogers
patiently removed each time to some spot where some one else found
them on top of something she wanted, and less patiently removed them
to some other spot, where still less patiently they were found in the
way and dumped some place else. Such was life in one factory. And Ada
would call out still later: "Mr. Rogers, did you see a pile of dresses
on this table when you went to work?"

Whereat in abject politeness and dismay Mr. Rogers would dash from
"inside" to "outside" and explain in very broken English that there
had been some things on the table, but "vaire carefully" he had placed
them--here. And to Mr. Rogers's startled gaze the pile had
disappeared.

If a dress had to be beaded, Mr. Rogers took the good