adually elicited a new tone from
MacQueen, who was by now talking to him almost as to an equal. Several
times Cally detected his eyes upon her, not bored but openly quizzical.

"Learning exactly how a cheroot factory ought to be run?" he asked,
_sotto voce_, as they left the second floor.

"Oh, exactly!... For one thing, I'd recommend a ventilator or two,
shouldn't you?"

She felt just a little foolish. She also felt out of her element,
incidental, irresponsible, and genuinely relieved. Still, through this
jumble of feelings she had not forgotten that they were yet to see that
part of the Works which she had specially come to peep at....

Progress upward was by means of a most primitive elevator, nothing but
an open platform of bare boards, which Mr. MacQueen worked with one
hand, and which interestingly pushed up the floor above as one ascended.
As they rose by this quaint device, Carlisle said:

"Is this next the bunching-room, Mr. MacQueen?"

"It is, Miss."

"Bunching-room!" echoed Hugo, with satiric admiration. "You _are_ an
expert...."

The lift-shaft ran in one corner of the long building. Debarking on the
third floor, the visitors had to step around a tall, shining machine,
not to mention two workmen who had evidently just landed it. Several
other machines stood loosely grouped here, all obviously new and not
yet in place.

Hugo, pointing with his stick, observed: "Clearing in new floor-space, I
see."

MacQueen nodded. "Knocked out a cloak-room. Our fight here's for space.
Profits get smaller all the time...."

"H'm.... You figured the strain, I suppose. Your floor looks weak."

"Oh, it'll stand it," said the man, shortly. "This way."

Carlisle wondered if the weak floor was what her friend Vivian had meant
when he said, in his extreme way, that the Works might fall down some
day. She recalled that she had thought the building looked rather
ricketty, that day last year. But these thoughts hardly entered her mind
before the sight of her eyes knocked them out. The visitors squeezed
around the new machines, and, doing so, stepped full into the
bunching-room. And the girl saw in one glance that this was the
strangest, the most interesting room she had ever seen in her life.

Her first confused sense was only of an astonishing mass of dirty white
womanhood. The thick hot room seemed swarming with women, alive and
teeming with women, women tumbling all over each other wherever the eye
turned. Tall cla