“It’s just terrible sitting here all day alone, worrying and thinking all by yourself and hustling from morning until night.  Lots of the girls have nervous prostration.  My sister had it and I guess I’m getting it.  I hear the noise all night.  Quite a few have consumption, too, from the dust and the lint.”

The butcher’s widow, the school-teacher and I started in at about the same time.  At the end of two weeks the butcher’s widow had long been gone.  The school-teacher had averaged seventy-nine cents a day and I had averaged eighty-nine.  My best day I finished sixteen dozen shirts and netted $1.11.  My board and washing cost me three dollars, so that from the first I had a living insured.

There was one negress in the factory.  She worked in a corner quite by herself and attended to menial jobs, such as sweeping and picking up scraps.  A great many of the girls and boys took correspondence courses in stenography, drawing, bookkeeping, illustrating, etc., etc.  The purely mechanical work of the mill does not satisfy them.  They are restless and ambitious, exactly the material with which to form schools of industrial art, the class of hand-workers of whom I have already spoken.

One of the girls who worked beside us as usual in the morning, left a note on her machine at noon one day to say that she would never be back.  She was going up to the lake to drown herself, and we needn’t look for her.  Some one was sent in search.  She was found sitting at the lake’s edge, weeping.  She did not speak.  We all talked about it in our leisure moments, but the work was not interrupted.  There were various explanations:  she was out of her mind; she was discouraged with her work; she was nervous.  No one suggested that an unfortunate love affair be the cause of her desperate act.  There was not a word breathed against her reputation.  I would have felt impure in proposing what to me seemed most probable.

The mill owners exert, as far as possible, an influence over the moral tone of their employees, assuming the right to judge their conduct both in and out of the factory and to treat them as they see fit.  The average girls are self-respecting.  They trifle with love.  The attraction they wish to exert is ever present in their minds and in their conversation.  The sacrifices they make for clothes are the first in importance.  They have superstitions of all kinds:  to sneeze on Saturday means the arrival of a beau on Sunday; a big or little tea leaf means a tall or a short caller, and so on.  There is a book of dreams kept on one table in the mill, and the girls consult it to find the interpretation of their nocturnal reveries.  They are fanciful, sentimental, cold, passionless.  The accepted honesty of married life makes them slow to discard the liberty they love, to dismiss the suitors who would attend their wedding as one would a funeral.

There is, of course, another category of girl, who goes brutally into passionate pleasures, follows the shows, drinks and knocks about town with the boys.  She is known as a “bum,” has sacrificed name and reputation and cannot remain in the mill.