adept can concoct much weightier
reasons as an afterthought. There is only one life most of us doubting
humans are absolutely sure of. That one life gets filled with so much
of the same sort of performance day in and day out; usually only an
unforeseen calamity--or stroke of luck--throws us into a way of living
and doing things which is not forever just as we lived and did things
yesterday and the day before.

Yet the world is so full of the unexplored! To those who care more for
people than places, around every corner is something new--a world only
dreamt of, if that. Why should all one's life be taken up with the
kind of people we were born among, doing the sort of things our aunts
and our uncles and our cousins and our friends do? Soon there creeps
in--soon? yes, by six years or younger--that comforting belief that as
we and our aunts and our uncles and our cousins and our friends do, so
does--or should do--the world. And all the time we and our aunts and
our uncles and our cousins and our friends are one little
infinitesimal drop in one hundred million people, and what those above
and below and beyond and around about think and do, we know nothing,
nor care nothing, about. But those others are the world, with us, a
speck of--well, in this case it happened to be curiosity--in the midst
of it all.

Therefore, being curious, we decided to work in factories. In addition
to wanting to feel a bona-fide part of a cross section of the world
before only viewed second or third hand through books, there was the
desire better to understand the industrial end of things by trying a
turn at what some eight million or so other women are doing. "Women's
place is the home." All right--that side of life we know first hand.
But more and more women are not staying home, either from choice or
from necessity. Reading about it is better than nothing. Being an
active part of it all is better still. It is one thing to lounge on an
overstuffed davenport and read about the injurious effect on women of
long hours of standing. It is another to be doing the standing.

Yet another reason for giving up some months to factory work, besides
the adventure of it, besides the desire to see other angles of life
for oneself, to experience first hand the industrial end of it. So
much of the technic of the world to-day we take as a matter of course.
Clothes appear ready to put on our backs. As far as we know or care,
angels left them on the hangers behin