large box at her right. She kept a small bin on the
table at the left of the press filled with parts she was to work on.
Around the sides of the floor were the table workers--girls adjusting
parts by hand, or soldering.

The other third of the floor was taken up with the machine presses,
which mostly clicked away cutting patterns in the brass parts to hold
the lamp chimney. In a far corner were the steaming, bleaching tubs
where dull, grimy brass parts were immersed in several preparations, I
don't know what, to emerge at last shining like the noonday sun.

The cold little girl with no hat, a strange, somewhat unsociable, new
person, and I stood there waiting one hour. Some one took our names.
The experienced feeling when they asked me where I had worked last
and how long was I there, and why did I leave! At the end of an hour
the forelady beckoned me--such a neat, sweet person as she was--and I
took my initial whack at a foot press. If ever I do run an automobile
the edge of first enjoyment is removed. A Rolls-Royce cannot make me
feel any more pleased with life than the first ten minutes of that
foot press. In ten minutes the job was all done and there I sat for an
hour and a half waiting for another. Hard on a person with the
foot-press fever. The times and times later I would gratefully have
taken any part of that hour and a half to ease my weary soul!

Be it known, if I speak feelingly at times of the weariness of a foot
press, that, though nothing as to size, I am a very husky
person--perhaps the healthiest of the eight million women in industry!
It was a matter of paternal dismay that I arrived in the world female
instead of male. What Providence had overlooked, mortal ability would
do everything possible to make up for--so argued a disappointed
father. From four years of age on I was taught to do everything a boy
could or would do; from jumping off cars while they were moving to
going up in a balloon. A good part of my life I have played tennis and
basketball and hockey, and swum, and climbed mountains, and ridden
horseback, and rowed, and fished. I do not know what it is to have an
ache or a pain from one end of the year to the other. All of which is
mentioned merely because if certain work taxes my strength, who
seldom has known what it is to be weary, what can it do to the average
factory worker, often without even a fighting physical chance from
birth on?

The jobs on our third floor where the girls and