This 'un, or Miller, was a tall, gaunt, sallow girl, who handled her
machine with the touch of a master, eliminating every superfluous move
and filling a form of a dozen rough cheroots quickly enough to take a
visitor's breath away. No doubt it was very instructive to see how fast
cheroots could be made. However, the stirring interest of the daughter
of the Works was not for mechanical skill.
Cally stood with a daintily scented handkerchief at her nostrils,
painfully drinking in the origins of the Heth fortune. The safeguarding
sense of irresponsibility ebbed, do what she might. Well she knew that
this place could not be so bad as it seemed to her; for then her father
would not have let it be so. For her to seem to disapprove of papa's
business methods was mere silly impertinence, on top of the disloyalty
of it. But none of the sane precepts she had had two weeks to think out
seemed to make any answer to the disturbing sensations she felt rising,
like a sickness, within her....
Her sense was of something polluting at the spring of her life. Here was
the soil that she was rooted in, and the soil was not clean. It might be
business, it might be right; but no argument could make it agreeable to
feel that the money she wore upon her back at this moment was made in
this malodorous place, by these thickly crowded girls.... Was it in such
thoughts that grew this sense of some personal relation of herself with
her father's most unpleasant bunching-room? Was it for such reasons that
V. Vivian had asked her that day at the Settlement why didn't she go to
the Works some day?...
She heard Hugo's voice, with a note of admiration for visible
efficiency: "How do they keep it up at this clip nine hours?"
"Got to do it, or others will."
"You expect each machine to produce so much, I suppose?"
And Cally, so close to her lordly lover that her arm brushed his, was
seeing for the first time in her life what people meant when they threw
bricks at papa on election night, or felt the strong necessity of
attacking him in the papers. By processes that were less mental than
emotional, even physical, she was driven further down a well-trod path
and stood dimly confronting the outlines of a vast interrogation....
What particular human worth had she, Cally Heth, that the womanhood of
these lower-class sisters should be sapped that she might wear silk next
her skin, and be bred to appeal to the highly cultivated tastes of a
Canning?...
If there are experiences which permanently extend the frontiers of
thought, it was not in this girl's power to recognize one of them
closing down on her now. But she did perceive, by the growing commotion
within, that she had made a great mistake to come to this place....
"Now, here's wrapping," said MacQueen. "Hand work, you see."
But his employer's daughter, it appeared, had seen enough of
cigar-making for one day. At that moment she touched Canning's
well-tailored arm.
"Let's go.... It's--stifling here."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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