achines, past soiled, busy backs. Close
on their left was the double row of tables, where the hurrying
"wrappers" sat like sardines. Cally now saw that these were not women at
all, but young girls, like Corinne; girls mostly younger than she
herself, some very much younger. Only they seemed to be girls with a
difference, girls who had somehow lost their girlhood. The rather
nauseating atmosphere which enveloped them, the way they were huddled
together yet never ceased to drive on their tasks, the slatternly
uncorseted figures, stolid faces and furtive glances; by something
indefinable in their situation, these girls seemed to have been degraded
and dehumanized, to have lost something more precious than virtue.

Yet some of them were quite pretty, beneath dust and fatigue; one, with
a quantity of crinkly auburn hair, was very pretty, indeed. The girl
Corinne, after three years here, was both pretty and possessed of a
certain delicacy; a delicacy which forbade her to tell Mr. Heth's
daughter what she really thought about the Works. For that must have
been it....

"This 'un can keep three wrappers pretty busy when she's feelin' good.
Can't yer, Miller?... Ye'll see the wrappers there, in a minute."

This 'un, or Miller, was a tall, gaunt, sallow girl, who handled her
machine with the touch of a master, eliminating every superfluous move
and filling a form of a dozen rough cheroots quickly enough to take a
visitor's breath away. No doubt it was very instructive to see how fast
cheroots could be made. However, the stirring interest of the daughter
of the Works was not for mechanical skill.

Cally stood with a daintily scented handkerchief at her nostrils,
painfully drinking in the origins of the Heth fortune. The safeguarding
sense of irresponsibility ebbed, do what she might. Well she knew that
this place could not be so bad as it seemed to her; for then her father
would not have let it be so. For her to seem to disapprove of papa's
business methods was mere silly impertinence, on top of the disloyalty
of it. But none of the sane precepts she had had two weeks to think out
seemed to make any answer to the disturbing sensations she felt rising,
like a sickness, within her....

Her sense was of something polluting at the spring of her life. Here was
the soil that she was rooted in, and the soil was not clean. It might be
business, it might be right; but no argument could make it agreeable to
feel that the money she wore