But after her lunch it was almost impossible for her to get up and go back to her task, and she would have fainted from sheer weariness except that she had forsworn such luxuries as swoons. The final whistle found her one entire neuralgia. The unending use of the same muscles, the repetition of the same rhythmic series, the cranium-shattering clatter of all the riveting-guns, the anxiety to be sure of each successive rivet, quite burned her out. And she learned that the reward for this ordeal was, according to the minimum wage-scale adopted by the Emergency Fleet Corporation, thirty cents an hour for eight hours, with a ten-per-cent. increase for a six-day week. This would amount to all of two dollars and sixty-four cents for the day, and fifteen dollars for the week! It was munificent for a passer-boy, but it was ruinous for a young woman of independent fortune and an ambition to look her best. She gasped with horror when she realized the petty reward for such prolonged torment. She was too weary to contrast the wage with the prices of food, fuel, and clothing. While wages climbed expenses soared. She understood as never before, and never after, why labor is discontent and why it is so easily stirred to rebellion, why it feels itself the exploited slave of imaginary tyrants. She went to bed at eight and slept in the deeps of sweat-earned repose. The next morning, getting up was like scourging a crowd of fagged-out children to school. All her limbs and sundry muscles whose existence she had never realized before were like separate children, each aching and wailing: "I can't! I won't!" But the lameness vanished when she was at work again, and her sinews began to learn their various trades and to manage them automatically. She grew strong and lusty, and her task grew easy. She began to understand that while the employee has troubles enough and to spare, he has none of the torments of leadership; he is not responsible for the securing of contracts and materials, for borrowings of capital from the banks, or for the weekly nightmare of meeting the pay-roll. There are two hells in the cosmos of manufacture: the dark pit where the laborer fights the tiny worms of expense and the dizzy crags where the employer battles with the dragons of aggregates. Mamise saw that most of the employees were employees because they lacked the self-starter of ambition. They were lazy-minded, and even their toiling bodies were lazy. For all their appearance of effort they did not ordinarily attain an efficiency of thirty per cent. of their capabilities. The turnover in employment was three times what it should have been. Three hundred men were hired for every hundred steadily at work, and the men at work did only a third of the work they could have done. The total wastefulness of man rivaled the ghastly wastefulness of nature with spawn and energy.