“Or quit at three,” from Annie. “Hisst!” I whisper, “I'm a lady in disguise!” And I quirk my little finger as I drink my coffee and order Eleanor to peer without to see if my limousine waits. We discuss rich folk and society ladies, and no one envies or is bitter. Miss Cross guesses some of them think they get as weary flying around to their parties and trying on clothes as we do in the laundry. I guess she is partly right. Then we discuss what a bore it would be not to work. At our table sit Miss Cross, Edna (Miss Cross calls her Edner), the Cuban girl, who refused to eat with the colored girls; Annie, the English girl, who had worked in a retail shoe shop in London; Mrs. Reilly, who is always morose at lunch and never speaks, except one day when she and Miss Cross nearly came to blows over religion. Each got purple in the face. Then it came out that there was a feud between them—two years or more it had lasted—and neither ever speaks to the other. (Yet Mrs. Reilly gave one dollar, twice as much as the rest of us, toward Miss Cross's Christmas present.) Then there are three girls from the office downstairs. Everyone there had had some experience in being out of work or not working. To each of them at such a time life has been a wearisome thing. Each declared she would 'most rather work at any old thing than stay home and do nothing. Between the first and second bells after lunch the sixth-floor girls foregather and sit on the ironing tables, swing our heels, and pass the time of day. To-day I start casually singing, “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” Everyone on our floor knows the song and there the whole lot of us sit, swinging our heels, singing at the top of our lungs, “A _sunbeam_, a _sunbeam_, Jesus wants me for a _sunbeam_,” which is how I got the name of “Sunbeam” on our floor. Except that Miss Cross, for some reason of her own, usually called me “Constance.” I teach them “My Heart's a Little Bird Cage,” and we add that to our repertoire. Then we go on to “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” “Lead, Kindly Light,” “Rock of Ages.” It appears we are a very religious lot on our floor. All the colored girls are Baptists. Miss Cross is an ardent Presbyterian, Annie is an Episcopalian, Edna and Mrs. Reilly are Catholics, but Edna knows all the hymns we daily sing. And, lo! before many days I am startled by hearing Lucia sing—woebegone Lucia. She sings to no tune whatever and smiles at me, “Sunbeam, Sunbeam, Sunbeam, Sunbeam.” So she has learned one English word in sixteen years. That is better in quality than German Tessie did. She told me, at the candy factory, that the first thing she learned in English was “son of a gun.” But as a matter of fact Lucia does know two other words. Once I ironed a very starched nightgown. It was a very, very large and gathered nightgown. I held it up and made Lucia look at it. Lucia snickered. “Da big-a, da fat-a!” said Lucia.