s were
handicaps.

To-day was sunny and the factory not so dark--in fact, part of the
time we worked with no electric lights. The crisp early morning air
those four blocks from the Subway to the factory--it sent the spring
fever through the blood. In the gutter of that dirty East Side street
a dirty East Side man was burning garbage. The smoke curled up lazily.
The sun just peeping up over the hospital at the end of the street
made slanting shafts through the smoke. As I passed by it suddenly was
no longer the East Side of New York City....

Now the Four Way Lodge is open,
Now the hunting winds are loose,
Now the smokes of spring go up to clear the brain....

Breakfast in a canon by the side of a stream--the odor of pines....
The little bobbing doors went to behind me and there I stood in floor
three, the stale gas and metal smell ... the whirs of the belts ...
the jarring of the presses....

Next to me this glorious morning sat a snip of a little thing all in
black--so pretty she was, so very pretty. I heard the boss tell her
it's not the sort of work she's been used to, she'll find it hard. Is
she sure she wants to try it? And in the course of the morning I heard
the story of Mame's life.

Mame's husband died three weeks ago. They had been married one month
and two days--after waiting three years. Shall I write a story of Mame
on the sob-sister order to bring the tears to your eyes? It could
easily be done. But not honestly. Little Mame--how could her foot ever
reach the press? And when she walked off after a drink, I saw that she
was quite lame. A widow only three weeks. She'd never worked before,
but there was no money. She lived all alone, wandered out for her
meals--no mother, no father, no sisters or brothers. She cried every
night. Her husband had been a traveling salesman--sometimes he made
eighty-five dollars a week. They had a six-room apartment and a
servant! She'd met him at a dance hall. A girl she was with had dared
her to wink at him. Sure she'd do anything anybody dared her to. He
came over and asked her what she was after, anyhow. That night he left
the girl he'd taken to the dance hall to pilot her own way back to
home and mother, and he saw Mame to her room. He was swell and tall.
She showed me his picture in a locket around her neck. Meanwhile Mame
kicked the foot press about twice every five minutes.

Why had they waited so long to get married? Because of the war. He was
afraid