e said.

"It took a thousand years." And left Fenger staring, puzzled.

She took next morning for her tour of the plant as Fenger had suggested.
She went through it, not as the startled, wide-eyed girl of eight months
before had gone, but critically, and with a little unconscious air of
authority. For, this organization, vast though it was, actually showed
her imprint. She could have put her finger on this spot, and that,
saying, "Here is the mark of my personality." And she thought, as she
passed from department to department, "Ten thousand a year, if you keep
on as you've started." Up one aisle and down the next. Bundles, bundles,
bundles. And everywhere you saw the yellow order-slips. In the hands of
the stock boys whizzing by on roller skates; in the filing department;
in the traffic department. The very air seemed jaundiced with those
clouds of yellow order-slips. She stopped a moment, fascinated as always
before the main spiral gravity chute down which the bundles--hundreds
of them, thousands of them daily--chased each other to--to what? Fanny
asked herself. She knew, vaguely, that hands caught these bundles
halfway, and redirected them toward the proper channel, where they were
assembled and made ready for shipping or mailing. She turned to a stock
boy.

"Where does this empty?" she asked.

"Floor below," said the boy, "on the platform."

Fanny walked down a flight of iron stairs, and around to face the spiral
chute again. In front of the chute, and connected with it by a great
metal lip, was a platform perhaps twelve feet above the floor and
looking very much like the pilot's deck of a ship. A little flight of
steps led up to it--very steep steps, that trembled a little under a
repetition of shocks that came from above. Fanny climbed them warily,
gained the top, and found herself standing next to the girl whose face
had gleamed out at her from among those thousands in the crowd pouring
out of the plant. The girl glanced up at Fanny for a second--no, for the
fraction of a second. Her job was the kind that permitted no more than
that. Fanny watched her for one breathless moment. In that moment she
understood the look that had been stamped on the girl's face that night;
the look that had cried: "Release!" For this platform, shaking under the
thud of bundles, bundles, bundles, was the stomach of the Haynes-Cooper
plant. Sixty per cent of the forty-five thousand daily orders passed
through the hands of this girl