rs. When the speeders are full of
yarn they are detached from the nest of steel in which they whirl and
are thrown into a hand-car which is pushed about the room by the girls
themselves. Speeding is excessively dirty work and greasy; the oiling
and cleaning is only fit for a man to do.

The girl who teaches me has been at her work for ten years; she entered
the factory at eight. She was tall, raw-boned, an expert, deft and
capable, and, as far as I could judge in our acquaintance, thoroughly
respectable.

There are long waits in this department of the cotton-spinning life. On
tall green stools we sit at the end of our sides during the time it
takes for one well-filled roper to spin itself out; we talk, or rather
contrive to make ourselves heard. She has a sweet, gentle face; she is
courtesy and kindness itself.

"What do you think about all day?"

"Why, I couldn't even begin to tell all my thoughts."

"Tell me some."

"Why, I think about books, I reckon. Do you-all like readin'?"

"Yes."

"Ain't nuthin' I like so good when I ain't tyrd."

"Are you often tired?" And this question surprises her. She looks up at
me and smiles. "Why, I'm _always_ tyrd! I read novels for the most part;
like to read love stories and about fo'ran travel."

(For one short moment please consider: This hemmed-in life, this limited
existence, encompassed on all sides by the warfare and battle and din of
maddening sounds, vibrations around her during twelve hours of the day,
vibrations which, mean that her food is being gained by each pulse of
the engine and its ratio marked off by the disk at her side. Before her
the scene is unchanged day after day, month after month, year after
year. It is not an experience to this woman who works beside me so
patiently; it is her life. The forms she sees are warped and scarred;
the intellects with which she comes in contact are dulled and
undeveloped. All they know is toil, all they know of gain is a
fluctuation in a wage that ranges from cents to a dollar and cents
again, never touching a two-dollar mark. The children who, barefooted,
filthy, brush past her, sweeping the cotton from the infected floors,
these are the only forms of childhood she has ever seen. The dirty women
around her, low-browed, sensual, are the forms of womanhood that she
knows; and the men? If she does not feed the passion of the overseer,
she may find some mill-hand who will contract a "mill marriage" with
this daughter of t