the eight o'clock bell. I squat next the thrifty Spanish lady, whereat she immediately begins telling me the story of her life.

“You married?” she asks. No. “Well don' you do it,” says the fat and mussy Espaniole, as the girls called her. “I marry man—five years, all right. One morning I say, 'I go to church—you go too?' He say 'No, I stay home.' I go church. I come home. I fin' him got young girl there. I say, 'You clear out my house, you your young girl!' Out he go, she go. 'Bout one year 'go he say he come back. I say no you don'. He beg me, beg me come home. I say no, no, no. He write me letter, letter, letter. I say no, no, no. Bymby I say alright, you come live my house don't you touch me, hear? Don' you touch me. He live one room, I live one room. He no touch me. Two weeks 'go he die. Take all my money, put him in cemetery. I have buy me black waist, black skirt. I got no money more. I want move from that house—no want live that house no more—give me bad dreams. I got no money move. Got son thirteen. He t'ink me fool have man around like that. I no care. See he sen's letter, letter, letter. Now I got no money. I have work.” The bell rings. We shiver ourselves into the ice box.

No Tessie across the table. Instead a strange, unkempt female who sticks it out half an hour, announces she has the chills in her feet, and departs. Her place is taken by a slightly less disheveled young woman who claims she'd packed candy before where they had seats and she thought she'd go back. They paid two dollars less a week, but it was worth two dollars to sit down. How she packs! The sloppiest work I ever saw. It outrages my soul. The thrill of new pride I have when Ida gets through swearing at her and turns to me.

“Keep your eye on this girl, will ya? Gee! she packs like a fright!” And to the newcomer: “You watch that girl across the table” (me, she means—me!) “and do the way she does.”

No first section I ever got in economics gave me such joy.

But, ah! the first feeling of industrial bitterness creeps in. Here is a girl getting fourteen dollars a week. Tessie was promised fourteen dollars a week. I packed faster, better, than either of them for thirteen dollars. I would have fourteen dollars, too, or know the reason why. Ida fussed and scolded over the new girls all day. The sweetness of her entire neglect of me!

By that noon my feet hardly hurt at all. I sit in a quiet corner to eat rye-bread sandwiches brought from home, gambling on whom I will draw for luncheon company. Six colored girls sit down at my table. A good part of the time they spend growling on the subject of overtime. I am too new to know what it is all about.

The lunch room is a bare, whitewashed, huge affair, with uplifting advice on the walls here and there. “Any fool can take a chance; it takes brains to be careful,” and such like. One got me all upset: “America is courteous to its women. Gentlemen will, therefore, please remove their hats in this room.” That Vandyke beard in the Subway!

By 4.30 again I think my feet will be the death of me. That last hour and a half! Louie, the general errand boy of our packing room, brushes by our table with some trays and knocks about six of my carefully packed boxes on the floor. “You Louie!” I holler, and I long to have acquired the facility to call lightly after him, as anyone else would have done, “Say, you go to hell!” Instead, mustering all the reserve force I can, the best showing I am able to make is, “You Louie! Go off and die!” I almost hold my own—468 boxes of “assorteds” do I pack. And again the anguishing stand in the Subway. I hate men—hate them. I just hope every one of them gets greeted by a nagging wife when he arrives home. Hope she nags all evening.... If enough of those wives really did do enough nagging, would the men thereupon stay downtown for dinner and make room in the Subway for folk who had been standing, except for one hour, from 7.15 A.M.? At last I see a silver lining to the dark cloud of marital unfelicity....

Lillian of the bright-pink boudoir cap engaged me in conversation this morning. Lillian is around the Indian summer of life—as to years, but not atmosphere. Lillian has seen better days. Makes sure you know it. Never did a lick of work in her life. At that she makes a noise with her upper lip the way a body does in southern Oregon when he uses a toothpick after a large meal. “No, sir, never did a lick.” Lillian says “did” and not “done.” Practically no encouragement is needed for Lillian to continue. “After my husband died I blew in all the money he left me in two years. Since then I have been packing chocolates.” How long ago was that?

“Five years.”

“My Gawd,” I say, and it comes natural-like. “What did you do with your feet for five years?”

“Oh, you get used to it,” says Lillian. “For months I cried every night. Don't any more. But I lie down while I'm warmin' up my supper, and then I go to bed soon as its et.”

Five years!

“Goin' to vote?” asks Lillian.

“Sure.”

“I'm not,” allows Lillian. “To my notions all that votin' business is nothing for a lady to get mixed up in. No, sir.” Lillian makes that noise with her upper lip again. Lillian's lips are very red, her eyebrows very black. I'll not do anything, though, with my eyebrows. Says Lillian: “No, siree, not for a lady. I got a good bet up on the election. Yes, sir!—fifty dollars on Harding.”

And five years of going to bed every night after supper.

Tessie is back. I do love Tessie, and I know Tessie loves me. She had not gone hunting for another job, as I thought. Her husband had had his elbow broken with an electric machine of some sort where he works on milk cans. The morning before she had taken him to the hospital. That made her ten minutes late to the factory. The little pop-eyed man told her, “You go on home!” and off she went. “But he tell me that once more I no come back again,” said Tessie, her cheeks very red.

I begin to get the “class feeling”—to understand a lot of things I wanted to know first hand. In the first place, there is no thought ever, and I don't see in that factory how there can be, for the boss and his interests. Who is he? Where is he? The nearest one comes to him is the pop-eyed man at the door. Once in a while Ida hollers “For Gawd's sake, girls, work faster!” Now that doesn't inspire to increased production for long. There stands Tessie across the table from me—peasant Tessie from near München, with her sweet face and white turned-up cap. She packs as fast as she can, but her hands are clumsy and she can't seem to get the difference between chocolates very well. It is enough to drive a seer crazy. They change the positions on the shelves every so often; the dipping-machine tenders cut capers and mark the same kind of chocolates differently to-day from yesterday. By three in the afternoon you're too sick of chocolates to do any more investigating by sampling. Even Ida herself has sometimes to poke a candy in the bottom—if it feels one way it's “marsh”; another, it's peach; another, it's coconut. But my feeling is not educated and I poke, and then end by having to bite, and then, just as I discover it is peach, after all, some one has run off with the last box and Ida has to be found and a substitute declared.

Tessie gives up in despair and hurls herself on me. So then Tessie is nearest to me in the whole factory, and Tessie is slow. The faster I pack the more it shows up Tessie's slowness. If Ida scolded Tessie it would break my heart. The thought of the man