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The factory-girls with boisterous good-nature had tried to make her sociable when she first came; they invited her to stroll with them by the river in the summer evenings, to stand and gossip with them at the street corners, to join in their parties of pleasure on Sundays.
If it were an impetuous stream, dashing along as if it claimed and required the career to which every American river is entitled, a career it would have. Wheels, factories, shops, traders, factory-girls, boards of directors, dreary white lines of boarding-houses, all the signs that indicate the spirit of the age, and of the American age, would arise upon its margin.
She came down presently, transformed, as only factory-girls are transformed, by the simple little toilet she had been making; her thin, soft hair knotted smoothly, the tips of her fingers rosy from the water, her pale neck well toned by her gray stuff dress and cape; Asenath always wore a cape: there was one of crimson flannel, with a hood, that she had meant to wear to-night; she had thought about it coming home from the mill; she was apt to wear it on Saturdays and Sundays; Dick had more time at home.
In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my hotel, and watched the long files of the work-worn factory-girls stream by, with no concern for them but to see which was pretty and which was plain, and with no dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten hours' work a day in those hideous mills and lodged them in the barracks where they rested from their toil.
In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my hotel, and watched the long files of the work-worn factory-girls stream by, with no concern for them but to see which was pretty and which was plain, and with no dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten hours' work a day in those hideous mills and lodged them in the barracks where they rested from their toil.
The most intelligent and most enterprising of the farmer's daughters become school-teachers, or tenders of shops, or factory-girls. They contemn the calling of their father, and will, nine times in ten, marry a mechanic in preference to a farmer. They know that marrying a farmer is a very serious business. They remember their worn-out mothers.
"I'll tell you what, Katie," she said, "let's take our money when we get it and get silks exactly alike; then we can wear them to Sunday-school together, and the other girls will see that it isn't so mean to be factory-girls after all. Even Miss Mountjoy herself can wear nothing finer than silk, if she does always look so stuck up." But Katie failed to be infected with a desire for a silk dress.
"Isn't it hateful? Just think of us made to work among factory-girls. I don't see what my father could have been thinking of!" Katie made no answer, but pointed to Miss Peters, and then to the rule for silence which was hung up conspicuously on the wall. "Nonsense!" said Bertie, "that don't mean me. I'm daughter of Mr Sanderson, the overseer of the bindery, don't you know?
The life of the Lowell factory-girls has full record in the little magazine called the "Lowell Offering," published by them for many years.
But what he found more difficult to put up with was, that on those occasions when he was fortunate, she was walking arm-in-arm with two or three other factory-girls, so that he scarcely got more than the one glimpse and short nod from her before they turned in now here, now there. What did she want to go loitering about in the evening with those dissipated girls for?
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