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But now I recognized with considerable foreboding, not only all this, but much more besides. Henrietta Manners, that humble, under-fed, miserable box-maker, was the very incarnation of bigotry and intolerance, one by whom any idea, or any act, word, or occurrence out of the ordinary rut set by box-factory canons of taste and judgment, must be condemned with despotic severity.
The night after I saw her here I went to see her at what, I supposed, was her home, just opposite the Hadley box-factory. Later she told me she didn't live there, and would not say where she lived. All the time I talked to her her eyes were on her hands in her lap and, though occasionally her lips would twist, she would say nothing.
She went this morning to the house just opposite the box-factory, but no one is living there. A "For Rent" sign is on it. After trying, without success, to find from the families who live in the neighborhood where the people who once occupied the house have gone, she went to the agent, but from him also she could learn nothing. "They were named Banch.
This girl had been at Old Orchard, where they had splendid times, with one veranda all to themselves and the gentlemen-help; and in the afternoon the girls got together on the beach or the grass right in front of the hotel and sewed. They got nearly as much as they did in the box-factory; and then the boarders all gave you something extra; some of them gave as much as a dollar a week apiece.
She was "Lame Lena" at Springer's box-factory; and in spite of her deformity, which made it difficult for her to walk across the floor, she was the quickest worker and made more money than any other girl in the shop. Tersely put, and quoting her own speech, the secret of her success was in "knowing how to kill two birds with one stone," and, again, "makin' of your cocoanut save your muscle."
"Is that so?" asked Lemuel; and he felt his heart suffused with tender pride and joy. He told her of the Misfit Parlours and the instalment plan, and she said, well, it was just splendid; and she asked him if he knew she wasn't in the store any more; and "No," she added delightedly, upon his confession of ignorance, "I'm going to work in the box-factory, after this, where 'Manda Grier works.
It is my last thought at night, my first in the morning. Yesterday I was at the box-factory where Jimmy Gibbons works. It is his last week there. On the fifteenth he starts again to school. Knowing the president of the company well, I asked that Jimmy should be my guide through the various departments, and permission was given. I wish Jimmy were mine.
Before entering upon my second day's work at the box-factory, and before detailing any of the strange things which that day brought forth, I feel it incumbent upon me to give some word of explanation as to my whereabouts during the intervening night. It will be remembered that when I left the factory at the end of the first day, I had neither a lodging nor a trunk.
These joys have been reserved for their little sisters, who, sooner or later, will step into their vacant places in the box-factory. What was denied Angelina it is the blessed privilege of Angelina's baby to revel in. Angelina's baby the little baby that she kept in the day-nursery when we worked together at Springer's now goes to a free kindergarten.
She and 'Manda Grier were both very gay, and made him very welcome. They had tea for him; Statira tried all her little arts, and 'Manda Grier told some things that had happened in the box-factory. He could not help laughing at them; they were really very funny; but he felt somehow that it was all a preparation for something else.
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