s my soul. The thrill of new pride I have when Ida
gets through swearing at her and turns to me.

"Keep your eye on this girl, will ya? Gee! she packs like a fright!"
And to the newcomer: "You watch that girl across the table" (me, she
means--me!) "and do the way she does."

No first section I ever got in economics gave me such joy.

But, ah! the first feeling of industrial bitterness creeps in. Here is
a girl getting fourteen dollars a week. Tessie was promised fourteen
dollars a week. I packed faster, better, than either of them for
thirteen dollars. I would have fourteen dollars, too, or know the
reason why. Ida fussed and scolded over the new girls all day. The
sweetness of her entire neglect of me!

By that noon my feet hardly hurt at all. I sit in a quiet corner to
eat rye-bread sandwiches brought from home, gambling on whom I will
draw for luncheon company. Six colored girls sit down at my table. A
good part of the time they spend growling on the subject of overtime.
I am too new to know what it is all about.

The lunch room is a bare, whitewashed, huge affair, with uplifting
advice on the walls here and there. "Any fool can take a chance; it
takes brains to be careful," and such like. One got me all upset:
"America is courteous to its women. Gentlemen will, therefore, please
remove their hats in this room." That Vandyke beard in the Subway!

By 4.30 again I think my feet will be the death of me. That last hour
and a half! Louie, the general errand boy of our packing room, brushes
by our table with some trays and knocks about six of my carefully
packed boxes on the floor. "You Louie!" I holler, and I long to have
acquired the facility to call lightly after him, as anyone else would
have done, "Say, you go to hell!" Instead, mustering all the reserve
force I can, the best showing I am able to make is, "You Louie! Go off
and die!" I almost hold my own--468 boxes of "assorteds" do I pack.
And again the anguishing stand in the Subway. I hate men--hate them. I
just hope every one of them gets greeted by a nagging wife when he
arrives home. Hope she nags all evening.... If enough of those wives
really did do enough nagging, would the men thereupon stay downtown
for dinner and make room in the Subway for folk who had been standing,
except for one hour, from 7.15 A.M.? At last I see a silver lining to
the dark cloud of marital unfelicity....

* * * * *

Lillian of the bright-pink b