five
hundred thousand yards last month?"

"I say it's grand," grinned Mrs. Owens. "More 'n a million over what
we done month before."

"Hi say--over fifteen million the last three months. Hi say we're some
bleachery, that's what _hi_ say!"

VI

_No. 1470, "Pantry Girl"_

Perhaps, more strictly speaking, instead of working with the working
woman, it was working with the working man. Hotel work is decidedly
co-educational! Except, indeed, for chambermaids and laundry workers,
where the traditionally female fields of bed-making and washing have
not been usurped by the male. Even they, those female chambermaids and
launderers, see more or less of working menfolk during the day. So it
might be thought then that hotel work offers an ideal field for the
growth of such normal intercourse between the sexes as leads to happy
matrimony. No need to depend on dance halls or the Subway to pick up a
"fella." No need for external administrations from wholesome social
workers whose aim is to enable the working man or woman to see
something of the opposite sex.

Yet forever are there flies in ointments. Flossie was one of the salad
girls in the main kitchen. Flossie was Irish, young, most of her teeth
gone. Her sister had worked at our hotel two years earlier, then had
sent for Flossie to come from Ireland. The sister was now married.

Innocently, interestedly, I asked, "To a man she knew here at the
hotel?"

Flossie cast a withering eye upon me. "The good Lord save us! I should
say not! And what decent girl would ever be marryin' the likes of a
man who worked around a hotel? She couldn't do much worse! Just steer
clear of hotel men, I'm tellin' ya. They're altogether too wise to be
safe for any girl."

We were eating supper. The table of eight all nodded assent.

Too wise or not too wise--at least there is a--cordiality--a
predisposition toward affection on the part of male hotel workers
which tends to make one's outside male associates seem fearfully
formal, if not stiffly antagonistic. If one grows accustomed to being
called "Sweetheart," "Darling" on first sight, ending in the evening
by the time-clock man's greeting of, "Here comes my little bunch of
love!"--is it not plain that outside in the cruel world such words as
a mere "How-do-you-do" or "Good morning" seem cold indeed?

What happens when a girl works three years in this affectionate
atmosphere an