and her assistants. Down the chutes
swished the bundles, stamped with their section mark, and here they were
caught deftly and hurled into one of the dozen conveyers that flowed
out from this main stream. The wrong bundle into the wrong conveyer?
Confusion in the shipping room. It only took a glance of the eye and a
motion of the arms. But that glance and that motion had been boiled down
to the very concentrated essence of economy. They seemed to be working
with fury, but then, so does a pile-driver until you get the simplicity
of it.

Fanny bent over the girl (it was a noisy corner) and put a question. The
girl did not pause in her work as she answered it. She caught a bundle
with one hand, hurled one into a conveyer with the other.

"Seven a week," she said. And deftly caught the next slithering bundle.

Fanny watched her for another moment. Then she turned and went down the
steep stairs.

"None of your business," she said to herself, and continued her tour.
"None of your business." She went up to the new selectors' floor, and
found the plan running as smoothly as if it had been part of the plant's
system for years. The elevator whisked her up to the top floor, where
she met the plant's latest practical fad, the new textile chemist--a
charming youth, disguised in bone-rimmed glasses, who did the honors of
his little laboratory with all the manner of a Harvard host. This was
the fusing oven for silks. Here was the drying oven. This delicate scale
weighed every ounce of the cloth swatches that came in for inspection,
to get the percentage of wool and cotton. Not a chance for the
manufacturer to slip shoddy into his goods, now.

"Mm," said Fanny, politely. She hated complicated processes that had to
do with scales, and weights, and pounds, and acids. She crossed over
to the Administration Building, and stopped at the door marked, "Mrs.
Knowles." If you had been an employee of the Haynes-Cooper company, and
had been asked to define Mrs. Knowles's position the chances are that
you would have found yourself floundering, wordless. Haynes-Cooper
was reluctant to acknowledge the need of Mrs. Knowles. Still, when you
employ ten thousand people, and more than half of these are girls, and
fifty per cent of these girls are unskilled, ignorant, and terribly
human you find that a Mrs. Knowles saves the equivalent of ten times her
salary in wear and tear and general prevention. She could have told you
tragic stories, could Mrs.