half an hour. The extra five minutes a day
mount up to thirty minutes a week and let us off at five on Saturdays.

The conversation around me leads me to suppose that my companions are
not downtrodden in any way, nor that they intend letting work interfere
with happiness. They have in their favour the most blessed of all
gifts--youth. The tragic faces one meets with are of the women
breadwinners whose burdens are overwhelming and of the children in whom
physical fatigue arrests development and all possibility of pleasure.
My present team-mates and those along the rest of the room are Americans
between fourteen and twenty-four years of age, full of unconscious hope
for the future, which is natural in healthy, well-fed youth, taking
their work cheerily as a self-imposed task in exchange for which they
can have more clothes and more diversions during their leisure hours.

The profitable job given us on the following day is monotonous and
dirty, but we net $1.05 each. There is a mechanical roller which passes
before us, carrying at irregular intervals a large sheet of coloured
paper covered with glue. My _vis-a-vis_ and I lay the palms of our right
hands on to the glue surface and lift the sheet of paper to its place on
the table before us, over a stiff square of bristol board. The boss of
the team fixes the two sheets together with a brush which she
manipulates skilfully. We are making in this way the stiff backs which
hold the pictures into their frames. When we have fallen into the proper
swing we finish one hundred sheets every forty-five minutes. We could
work more rapidly, but the sheets are furnished to us at this rate, and
it is so comfortable that conversation is not interrupted. The subjects
are the same as elsewhere--dress, young men, entertainments. The girls
have "beaux" and "steady beaux." The expression, "Who is she going
with?" means who is her steady beau. "I've got Jim Smith _now_, but I
don't know whether I'll keep him," means that Jim Smith is on trial as
a beau and may become a "steady." They go to Sunday night subscription
dances and arrive Monday morning looking years older than on Saturday,
after having danced until early morning. "There's nothing so smart for a
ball," the mundane of my team tells us, "as a black skirt and white silk
waist."

About ten in the morning most of us eat a pickle or a bit of cocoanut
cake or some titbit from the lunch parcel which is opened seriously at
twelve.

The li