lush at what we are used to hearing.
Still, the tenement female sex is as full of affectation as is
the sex elsewhere. But, Susan, the curiously self-unconscious,
was incapable of affectation. Her indignation arose from her
sense of the hideous injustice of Matson's discharging girls for
doing what his meager wages all but compelled.

"Yes, I've been watching you," he went on, "with a kind of a
sort of a notion of makin' you a forelady. That'd mean six
dollars a week. But you ain't fit. You've got the brains--plenty
of 'em. But you wouldn't be of no use to me as forelady."

"Why not?" asked Susan. Six dollars a week! Affluence! Wealth!

Matson took his feet down, relit his cigar and swung himself
into an oracular attitude.

"I'll show you. What's manufacturin'? Right down at the bottom,
I mean." He looked hard at the girl. She looked receptively at him.

"Why, it's gettin' work out of the hands. New ideas is nothin'.
You can steal 'em the minute the other fellow uses 'em. No, it's
all in gettin' work out of the hands."

Susan's expression suggested one who sees light and wishes to
see more of it. He proceeded:

"You work for me--for instance, now, if every day you make stuff
there's a profit of five dollars on, I get five dollars out of
you. If I can push you to make stuff there's a profit of six
dollars on, I get six dollars--a dollar more. Clear extra gain,
isn't it? Now multiply a dollar by the number of hands, and
you'll see what it amounts to."

"I see," said Susan, nodding thoughtfully.

"Well! How did I get up? Because as a foreman I knew how to work
the hands. I knew how to get those extra dollars. And how do I
keep up? Because I hire forepeople that get work out of the hands."

Susan understood. But her expression was a comment that was not
missed by the shrewd Matson.

"Now, listen to me, Lorny. I want to give you a plain straight
talk because I'd like to see you climb. Ever since you've been
here I've been laughin' to myself over the way your
forelady--she's a fox, she is!--makes you the pacemaker for the
other girls. She squeezes at least twenty-five cents a day over
what she used to out of each hand in your room because you're
above the rest of them dirty, shiftless muttonheads."

Susan flushed at this fling at her fellow-workers.

"Dirty, shiftless muttonheads," repeated Matson. "Ain't I right?
Ain't they dirty? Ain't they shiftless--so no-account that if
they