The steps were but a long ladder set in the wall, not the great staircase used by the hands: that was on the other side of the factory. It was a huge, unwieldy building, such as crowd the suburbs of trading towns. This one went round the four sides of a square, with the yard for the vats in the middle. The ladders and passages she passed down were on the inside, narrow and dimly lighted: she had to grope her way sometimes. The floors shook constantly with the incessant thud of the great looms that filled each story, like heavy, monotonous thunder. It deafened her, made her dizzy, as she went down slowly. It was no short walk to reach the lower hall, but she was down at last. Doors opened from it into the ground-floor ware-rooms; glancing in, she saw vast, dingy recesses of boxes piled up to the dark ceilings. There was a crowd of porters and draymen cracking their whips, and lounging on the trucks by the door, waiting for loads, talking politics, and smoking. The smell of tobacco, copperas, and burning logwood was heavy to clamminess here. She stopped, uncertain. One of the porters, a short, sickly man, who stood aloof from the rest, pushed open a door for her with his staff. Margaret had a quick memory for faces; she thought she had seen this one before, as she passed,--a dark face, sullen, heavy-lipped, the hair cut convict-fashion, close to the head. She thought, too, one of the men muttered "jail-bird," jeering him for his forwardness. "Load for Clinton! Western Railroad!" sung out a sharp voice behind her, and, as she went into the street, a train of cars rushed into the hall to be loaded, and men swarmed out of every corner,--red-faced and pale, whiskey-bloated and heavy-brained, Irish, Dutch, black, with souls half asleep somewhere, and the destiny of a nation in their grasp,--hands, like herself, going through the slow, heavy work, for, as Pike the manager would have told you, "three dollars a week,--good wages these tight times." For nothing more? Some other meaning may have fallen from their faces into this girl's quiet intuition in the instant's glance,--cheerfuller, remoter aims, hidden in the most sensual face,--homeliest home-scenes, low climbing ambitions, some delirium of pleasure to come,--whiskey, if nothing better: aims in life like yours, differing in degree, needing only to make them the same----did you say what?