leaned back in their
chairs to listen, while Hertha sipped her coffee that she knew she
should not drink, and looked with apprehension, but with admiration
also, into Kathleen's face. What wonderful gray eyes this Irishwoman
had, and how whole-heartedly she flung herself into whatever she had to
say! She was like a bright beam of sunlight falling suddenly into a dull
room; or, again, like a flash of lightning that carried with it an
ominous rumble of thunder. The world would be a wonderful, sublimely
happy place when it let the sunlight triumph in lives like Kathleen's.

"I was eleven years old," she began, "when I led out the spinning-room
in the factory up in the hills in this glorious old state. We were all a
lot of children, some bigger than me, some smaller, and we worked from
sun to sun. For wages, we had none, not that we ever knew, and I doubt
if our fathers or mothers ever saw a penny from us, for what with the
rent and the bills at the company store, it's little money they ever
handled. But every morning we went into the huge building that shut out
the world from us and turned our red lips white, and every night we came
back, the boys too tired to throw stones at a stray hen.

"Well, one day when we started work we found a new foreman. The man
before him had been a decent sort of chap, rough after his fashion,
pulling our ears maybe to make us work faster, or batting a boy over the
head, but with a heart in his body. But this morning he was gone, and in
his place a great giant of a creature named Hicks who roared at us in a
voice that made our hearts jump. Not but what we was always ruled by
terror. It was do as you were bid or death, and no incarnation, but
forever and ever annihilation. But Hicks was the very ogre of the story
book, and we expected to hear him call out any minute:

"'Fee, fi, fo, fum,
I smell the blood of an Irishman!"

And make a pounce on one of us. And we weren't mistaken, for soon the
pounce came.

"It's hard work in the spinning-room and I wonder now how such children
as we ever managed to do it at all. I suppose our strength and power,
that ought to have gone out into lessons at school, and learning to keep
house at home, and baseball and fishing and swimming, went into watching
the spools as they whirled on the spindles or keeping our eyes open to
catch the broken threads. How I used to see those spools, hundreds there
were that I took care of, twirling around and around