d have been fired for. Her wide mouth was capable of glorious
insolences. Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter from the girls'
washroom at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth to an admiring
group. She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with the gift of
burlesque. The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from Europe wearing
the first tight skirt that Chippewa had ever seen, Tessie gave an
imitation of that advanced young woman's progress down Grand Avenue in
this restricting garment. The thing was cruel in its fidelity, though
containing just enough exaggeration to make it artistic. She followed
it up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie Haynes,
cloak-and-suit buyer at Megan's, who, having just returned from the
East with what she considered the most fashionable of the new fall
styles, now beheld Angie Hatton in the garb that was the last echo of
the last cry in Paris modes--and no model in Mattie's newly selected
stock bore even the remotest resemblance to it.

You would know from this that Tessie was not a particularly deft
worker. Her big-knuckled fingers were cleverer at turning out a blouse
or retrimming a hat. Hers were what are known as handy hands, but not
sensitive. It takes a light and facile set of fingers to fit pallet
and arbor and fork together: close work and tedious. Seated on low
benches along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top,
the girls worked with pincers and flame, screwing together the three
tiny parts of the watch's anatomy that were their particular specialty.
Each wore a jeweler's glass in one eye. Tessie had worked at the watch
factory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eye
socket had given her the slightly hollow-eyed appearance peculiar to
experienced watchmakers. It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her,
somehow, a spiritual look which made her impudence all the more piquant.

Tessie wasn't always witty, really. But she had achieved a reputation
for wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts. Nap
Ballou, the foreman, never left the escapement room without a little
shiver of nervous apprehension--a feeling justified by the ripple of
suppressed laughter that went up and down the long tables. He knew
that Tessie Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher's back is
turned, had directed one of her sure shafts at him.

Ballou, his face darkling, could easily have punished her. Tessie knew
it. Bu