d the mirrored sliding doors.
Food is set on our tables ready to eat. It might as well have been
created that way, for all our concern. The thousands of operations
that go into an article before the consumer buys it--no, there is no
reason why use and want should make us callous and indifferent to the
hows and wherefores. Never was there such an age. Let's poke behind
the scenes a bit.

So, factories it was to be. Not as a stranger snooping in to
"investigate." As a factory girl working at her job--with all that, we
determined to peek out of the corner of our eyes, and keep both ears
to the wind, lest we miss anything from start to finish. Artificial,
of course. Under the circumstances, since we were born how and as we
were, and this had happened and that, we were not an honest Eyetalian
living in a back bedroom on West Forty-fourth Street near the river.

We did what we could to feel the part. Every lady in the land knows
the psychology of dress--though not always expressed by her in those
terms. She feels the way she looks, not the other way round. So then,
we purchased large green earrings, a large bar pin of platinum and
brilliants ($1.79), a goldy box of powder (two shades), a lip stick.
During the summer we faded a green tam-o'shanter so that it would not
look too new. For a year we had been saving a blue-serge dress
(original cost $19) from the rag bag for the purpose. We wore a pair
of old spats which just missed being mates as to shade, and a button
off one. Silk stockings--oh yes, silk--but very darned. A blue
sweater, an orange scarf, and last, but not least--

If you had been brought up in a fairly small city by female relatives
who were one and all school-teachers, who had watched over your
vocabulary (unsuccessfully) as they hung over your morals; if you had
been taught, not in so many words, but insidiously, that breaking the
Ten Commandments (any one or the entire ten), split infinitives, and
chewing gum, were one in the sight of God, or the devil--then you
could realize the complete metamorphosis when, in addition to the
earrings and the bar pin, the green tam and the lip stick, you stepped
up to the Subway newsstand and boldly demanded a package of--chewing
gum. And then and there got out a stick and chewed it, and chewed it
on the Subway and chewed it on the streets of New York. Some people
have to go to a masquerade ball to feel themselves some one else for a
change. Others, if they have been brou