"And you aren't living at home. You must have a hard time. Not much over for diamonds, eh? You want to hustle round and get married, Lorny. Looks don't last long when a gal works. But you're holdin' out better'n them that gads and dances all night." "I help at the restaurant in the evening to piece out my board. I'm pretty tired when I get a chance to go to bed." "I'll bet!. . . So, you want more money. I've been watchin' you. I watch all my gals--I have to, to keep weedin' out the fast ones. I won't have no bad examples in _my_ place! As soon as I ketch a gal livin' beyond her wages I give her the bounce." Susan lowered her eyes and her cheeks burned--not because Matson was frankly discussing the frivolous subject of sex. Another girl might have affected the air of distressed modesty, but it would have been affectation, pure and simple, as in those regions all were used to hearing the frankest, vilest things--and we do not blush at what we are used to hearing. Still, the tenement female sex is as full of affectation as is the sex elsewhere. But, Susan, the curiously self-unconscious, was incapable of affectation. Her indignation arose from her sense of the hideous injustice of Matson's discharging girls for doing what his meager wages all but compelled. "Yes, I've been watching you," he went on, "with a kind of a sort of a notion of makin' you a forelady. That'd mean six dollars a week. But you ain't fit. You've got the brains--plenty of 'em. But you wouldn't be of no use to me as forelady." "Why not?" asked Susan. Six dollars a week! Affluence! Wealth! Matson took his feet down, relit his cigar and swung himself into an oracular attitude. "I'll show you. What's manufacturin'? Right down at the bottom, I mean." He looked hard at the girl. She looked receptively at him. "Why, it's gettin' work out of the hands. New ideas is nothin'. You can steal 'em the minute the other fellow uses 'em. No, it's all in gettin' work out of the hands." Susan's expression suggested one who sees light and wishes to see more of it. He proceeded: "You work for me--for instance, now, if every day you make stuff there's a profit of five dollars on, I get five dollars out of you. If I can push you to make stuff there's a profit of six dollars on, I get six dollars--a dollar more. Clear extra gain, isn't it? Now multiply a dollar by the number of hands, and you'll see what it amounts to." "I see," said Susan, nodding thoughtfully. "Well! How did I get up? Because as a foreman I knew how to work the hands. I knew how to get those extra dollars. And how do I keep up? Because I hire forepeople that get work out of the hands." Susan understood. But her expression was a comment that was not missed by the shrewd Matson.