cking machines ran closely around the walls of the room,
down the middle stood a double row of tables; and at each machine, and
at every possible place at the tables, sat a woman crowded upon a woman,
and another and another.

Dirt, noise, heat, and smell: women, women, women. Conglomeration of
human and inhuman such as the eyes of the refined seldom look upon....
Was this, indeed, the pleasantest place to work in town?...

"Bunchin' and wrappin'," said MacQueen. "Filler's fed in from that basin
on top. She slips in the binder--machine rolls 'em together.... Ye can
see here."

They halted by one of the bunching-machines, and saw the parts
dexterously brought together into the crude semblance of the product,
saw the embryo cigars thrust into wooden forms which would shape them
yet further for their uses in a world asmoke....

"Jove! Watch how her hands fly!" said Hugo, with manlike interest for
processes, things done. "Look, Carlisle."

Carlisle looked dutifully. It was in the order of things that she
should bring Hugo to the Works, and that, being here, he should take
charge of her. But, unconsciously, she soon turned her back to the busy
machine, impelled by the mounting interest she felt to see bunching, not
in detail, but in the large.

Downstairs the workers had been negroes; here they were white women, a
different matter. But Cally had a closer association than that, in the
girl she had just been talking to, Corinne, who had worked three years
in this room. It wasn't so easy to preserve the valuable detached point
of view, when you actually knew one of the people....

"Three cents a hundred," said MacQueen's rugged voice.

There was a fine brown dust in the air of the teeming room, and the
sickening smell of new tobacco. Not a window in the place was open, and
the strong steam heat seemed almost overwhelming. The women had now been
at it for near nine hours. Damp, streaked faces, for the most part pale
and somewhat heavy, turned incessantly toward the large wall-clock at
one end of the room. Eyes looked sidewise upon the elegant visitors, but
then the flying fingers were off again, for time is strictly money with
piecework ... How could they stand being so _crowded_, and couldn't they
have any _air_?

"Oh, five thousand a day--plenty of them."

"Five thousand!--how do they do it?"

"We had a girl do sixty-five hundred. She's quit ... Here's one down
here ain't bad."

The trio moved down the line of m