“Well, I start you packing. You get thirteen dollars this week, fourteen dollars next—you understand?” He writes something on a little card and I go upstairs with it. There I am asked my name, age (just did away with ten years while I was at it). Married or single? Goodness! hadn't thought of that. In the end a lie there would make less conversation. Single. Nationality—Eyetalian? No, American. It all has to be written on a card. At that point my eye lights on a sign which reads: “Hours for girls 8 A.M.-6 P.M. Saturdays 8-12.” Whew! My number is 1075. The time clock works so. My key hangs on this hook; then after I ring up, it hangs here. (That was an entrancing detail I had not anticipated—made me wish we had to ring up at noon as well as morning and night.) Locker key 222. A man takes me in the elevator to the third floor and there hands me over to Ida. The locker works thus and so. Didn't I have no apron? No—but to-morrow I'd bring it, and a cap. Sure. Three piles of boxes and trucks and barrels and Ida opens a great door like a safe, and there we are in the packing room—from the steam heater downstairs to the North Pole. Cold? Nothing ever was so cold. Ten long zinc-topped tables, a girl or two on each side. At the right, windows which let in no air and little light, nor could you see out at all. On the left, shelves piled high with wooden boxes. Mostly all a body can think of is how cold, cold, cold it is. Something happens to chocolates otherwise. That first day it is half-pound boxes. My side of the table holds some sixty at a time. First the date gets stamped on the bottom, then partitions are fitted in. “Here's your sample. Under the table you'll find the candies, or else ask Fannie, there. You take the paper cups so, in your left hand, give them a snap so, lick your fingers now and then, slip a cup off, stick the candy in with your right hand.” And Ida is off. The saints curse the next person who delicately picks a chocolate from its curled casing and thinks it grew that way—came born in that paper cup. May he or she choke on it! Can I ever again buy chocolates otherwise than loose in a paper bag? You push and shove—not a cup budges from its friends and relatives. Perhaps your fingers need more licking. Perhaps the cups need more “snapping.” In the end you hold a handful of messed-up crumpled erstwhile cup-shaped paper containers, the first one pried off looking more like a puppy-chewed mat by the time it is loose and a chocolate planted on its middle. By then, needless to remark, the bloom is off the chocolate. It has the look of being clutched in a warm hand during an entire circus parade. Whereat you glance about furtively and quickly eat it. It is nice the room is cold; already you fairly perspire. One mussed piece of naked brown paper in a corner of a box.