ive your hat to
see that fight?"

Meanwhile I was nearly drowning myself and the labels in paste, at the
same time trying to appear intelligent about a lot of things I
evidently was most uninformed about; working up an enthusiasm for the
Dempsey-Carpentier fight which would have led anyone to believe my
sole object in working was to accumulate enough cash to pay the price
of admission. And all this time I was feasting my eyes on fresh-faced
girls in summer wash dresses, mostly Americans, some Italians; no
rouge whatever; not a sign of a lipstick, except on one girl; little
or no powder; a large, airy, clean, white room, red-and-white striped
awnings at the windows; and wherever the eye looked hillsides solid
with green trees almost close enough to touch (the bleachery was built
down in a hollow beside a little river). Oh, it was too good to be
true, after New York!

Pretty gray-haired, pink-cheeked (real genuine pink-cheeked) Mrs. Hall
and I were talking about the bleachery on our way to work one morning.
Mrs. Hall had been a forelady in a New York private dressmaking
establishment. She had what is called "style and personality." Her
wages in New York had been thirty-five dollars a week, and she had
much variety and responsibility, which she loved. Circumstances
brought her to the Falls. She had never worked in a factory; the very
idea had appalled her, yet she must work. One day she went up to
Department 10 to see what it was all like. "Why," she said, "it took
my breath away! I felt as if I was in one of those lovely rooms where
they did Red Cross work during the war. Of course I get only a small
amount a week and it's the same thing over and over again, and after
what I was used to in New York that's hard. But it never seems like I
was in a factory, somehow."

Just so. There was never the least "factory atmosphere" about the
place. It used to make me think of a reception, the voice of the
machines for the music, with always, always the sound of much talk and
laughter above the whir. Sometimes--especially Mondays, with everyone
telling everyone else what she had done over the week end, and for
some reason or other Fridays, the talk was "enough to get you crazy,"
Margaret used to say. "Sure it makes my head swim." Nor was the
laughter the giggling kind, indulged in when the forelady was not
looking. It was the riotous variety, where at least one of a group
would "laugh till she most cried"; nor did it make the leas