t."
And that's just what I decided. "Lay off now and then." Yes indeed, I
was going to lay off now and then.

"I see myself breakin' my neck for thirteen dollars a week," Bella
chipped in.

"You said it!" from all the others.

So I kicked over 16,000 times that day and let it go as my final swan
song. No more breaking records for me. My head thumped, thumped,
thumped all that night. After that I strolled up front for a drink and
a gossip or back to a corner of the wash room where two or three were
sure to be squatting on some old stairs, fussing over the universe.
When the boss was up on the other end of the floor, sometimes I just
sat at my machine and did nothing. It hurt something within my soul at
first, but my head and hands and legs and feet and neck and general
disposition felt considerably better.

Lunch times suited me exactly at the brassworks, making me feel I was
getting what I was after. Three of us used to gather around Irish
Minnie, put two stools lengthwise on the floor, and squat along the
sides. Bella, who'd worked in Detroit for seven dollars a day (her
figures), a husky good-looking person; Rosie, the prettiest little
sixteen-year-old Italian girl; and I. Such conversations! One day they
unearthed Harry Thaw and Evelyn Nesbit and redid their past, present,
and probable future. We discussed whether Olive Thomas had really
committed suicide or died of an overdose of something. How many nights
a week could a girl dance and work next day? Minnie was past her
dancing days. She'd been married 'most twenty years and was getting
fat and unformed-looking; shuffled about in a pair of old white tennis
shoes and a pink boudoir cap. (No one else wore a cap at the
brassworks.) Minnie had worked fifteen years at a power press, eleven
years at her last job. She was getting the generous stipend of
fourteen dollars a week (one dollar more than the rest of us). She had
earned as much as twenty-five dollars a week in her old job at the tin
can company, piecework. Everybody about the factory told her troubles
to Minnie, who immediately told them to everybody else. It made for a
certain community interest. One morning Minnie would tell me, as I
passed her machine, "Rosie 'n' Frank have had a fight." With that cue
it was easy to appear intelligent concerning future developments.
Frank was one of the machinists, an Italian. Rosie had let him make
certain advances--put his arm around her and all that--but she told us
o