saints curse the next person who delicately picks a chocolate from
its curled casing and thinks it grew that way--came born in that paper
cup. May he or she choke on it! Can I ever again buy chocolates
otherwise than loose in a paper bag? You push and shove--not a cup
budges from its friends and relatives. Perhaps your fingers need more
licking. Perhaps the cups need more "snapping." In the end you hold a
handful of messed-up crumpled erstwhile cup-shaped paper containers,
the first one pried off looking more like a puppy-chewed mat by the
time it is loose and a chocolate planted on its middle. By then,
needless to remark, the bloom is off the chocolate. It has the look of
being clutched in a warm hand during an entire circus parade. Whereat
you glance about furtively and quickly eat it. It is nice the room is
cold; already you fairly perspire. One mussed piece of naked brown
paper in a corner of a box.

The table ahead, fingers flying like mad over the boxes, works Annie.
It is plain she will have sixty boxes done before I have one. Just
then a new girl from the line of that morning is put on the other side
of my table. She is very cold. She fares worse with brown paper cups
than I. Finally she puts down the patient piece of chocolate candy
and takes both hands to the job of separating one cup from the others.
She places what is left of the chocolate in the middle of what is left
of the paper, looks at me, and better than any ouija board I know what
is going on in her head. I smile at her, she smiles back, and she eats
that first chocolate. Tessie and I are friends for life.

Then we tackle the second union of chocolate and paper. Such is life.
Allah be praised, the second goes a shade less desperately than the
first, the third than the second, and in an hour chocolate and paper
get together without untoward damage to either. But the room stays
feeling warm. Anon a sensation begins to get mixed up with the hectic
efforts of fingers. Yes, yes--now it's clear what it is--feet! Is one
never to sit down again as long as one lives? Clumsy fingers--feet.
Feet--clumsy fingers. Finally you don't give a cent if you never learn
to pry those paper cups loose without wrenching your very soul in the
effort. If once before you die--just once--you can sit down! Till 12
and then after, 1 till 6. Help!

A bell rings. "All right, girls!" sings Ida down the line. Everyone
drops everything, and out into the warm main third floor we go.