me. Within a week after the two girls received the telegrams,
tongues got busy. Margaret looked ready to cry one afternoon.

"Hey! what's the matter?"

"My Gawd! This place makes you sick. Can't no one let a person get
started enjoyin' themselves but what they do their best to spoil it
for you!" Her hands were wrapping pillow case bundles like lightning,
her head bent over her work. "Don't I know I ain't nothin' but a
factory girl? Don't I know I probably won't ever be nothin' but one?
Can't a person take a chance to get off for two months and go to that
college without everybody sayin' you're tryin' to be stuck up and get
to be somethin' grand and think you won't be a factory girl no more? I
don't see anything I'm gettin' out of this that's goin' to make me
anything but just a factory girl still. I'm not comin' back and put on
any airs. My Gawd! My Gawd! Why can't they leave you alone?"

I asked two of the Falls men I knew if their sex would have acted the
same as the girls, had it been two men going off for a two months'
treat. "You bet," they answered. "It's your darn small-town jealousy,
and not just female at all."

Suppose, then, on top of all the drawbacks of small-town life, the
girls had to work under big-city factory conditions? At least there
was always the laughter, always the talk, always the visiting back and
forth, at the bleachery.

My last day on the job witnessed a real event. Katie Martin was to be
married in ten days. Therefore, she must have her tin shower at the
bleachery. Certain traditions of that sort were unavoidable. At
Christmas time the entire Department 10 was decorated from end to end
until it was resplendent. Such merrymaking as went on, such presents
as were exchanged! And when any girl, American or Italian, was to be
married, the whole department gave her a tin shower.

Katie Martin inspected and folded sheets. She was to marry the brother
of young Mrs. Annie Turner, who ticketed sheets. Annie saw to it that
Katie did not get to work promptly that noon. When she did appear, all
out of breath and combing back her hair (no one ever wore a hat to
work), there on two lines above her table hung the "shower." The rest
of us had been there fifteen minutes, undoing packages, giggling,
commenting. Except old Mrs. Brown's present. It was her first
experience at a tin shower and she came up to me in great distress.
"Can't you stop them girls undoin' all her packages? 'Tain't right.
She ough