impressed itself on her in a rough way. She did
not venture to look around, but above the clack of the machine she could
hear an occasional remark. She could also note a thing or two out of the
side of her eye.

"Did you see Harry last night?" said the girl at her left, addressing
her neighbour.

"No."

"You ought to have seen the tie he had on. Gee, but he was a mark."

"S-s-t," said the other girl, bending over her work. The first,
silenced, instantly assumed a solemn face. The foreman passed slowly
along, eyeing each worker distinctly. The moment he was gone, the
conversation was resumed again.

"Say," began the girl at her left, "what jeh think he said?"

"I don't know."

"He said he saw us with Eddie Harris at Martin's last night." "No!" They
both giggled.

A youth with tan-coloured hair, that needed clipping very badly, came
shuffling along between the machines, bearing a basket of leather
findings under his left arm, and pressed against his stomach. When near
Carrie, he stretched out his right hand and gripped one girl under the
arm.

"Aw, let me go," she exclaimed angrily. "Duffer."

He only grinned broadly in return.

"Rubber!" he called back as she looked after him. There was nothing of
the gallant in him.

Carrie at last could scarcely sit still. Her legs began to tire and she
wanted to get up and stretch. Would noon never come? It seemed as if she
had worked an entire day. She was not hungry at all, but weak, and her
eyes were tired, straining at the one point where the eye-punch came
down. The girl at the right noticed her squirmings and felt sorry for
her. She was concentrating herself too thoroughly--what she did really
required less mental and physical strain. There was nothing to be done,
however. The halves of the uppers came piling steadily down. Her hands
began to ache at the wrists and then in the fingers, and towards the
last she seemed one mass of dull, complaining muscles, fixed in an
eternal position and performing a single mechanical movement which
became more and more distasteful, until as last it was absolutely
nauseating. When she was wondering whether the strain would ever cease,
a dull-sounding bell clanged somewhere down an elevator shaft, and the
end came. In an instant there was a buzz of action and conversation. All
the girls instantly left their stools and hurried away in an adjoining
room, men passed through, coming from some department which opened on
the right. Th