Back and forth it went—all the small gossip of the small town where everyone knows everything about everyone else from start to finish. It was all a bit too mild for Mamie, as I later learned—indeed, I began to learn it that day. It was no time before Mamie was asking my opinion on every detail of the Stillman case: Did I think Mrs. Stokes would get her divorce? Did I consider somebody or other guilty of some crime or other? Somebody gets the electric chair to-morrow? Wasn't it the strangest thing that somebody's body hadn't been recovered yet? Whatdyaknow about a father what'll strangle his own child? A man got drowned after he'd been married only two days. And did I think Dempsey or Carpentier would win the fight? “Gee! Wouldn't you give your hat to see that fight?” Meanwhile I was nearly drowning myself and the labels in paste, at the same time trying to appear intelligent about a lot of things I evidently was most uninformed about; working up an enthusiasm for the Dempsey-Carpentier fight which would have led anyone to believe my sole object in working was to accumulate enough cash to pay the price of admission. And all this time I was feasting my eyes on fresh-faced girls in summer wash dresses, mostly Americans, some Italians; no rouge whatever; not a sign of a lipstick, except on one girl; little or no powder; a large, airy, clean, white room, red-and-white striped awnings at the windows; and wherever the eye looked hillsides solid with green trees almost close enough to touch (the bleachery was built down in a hollow beside a little river). Oh, it was too good to be true, after New York! Pretty gray-haired, pink-cheeked (real genuine pink-cheeked) Mrs. Hall and I were talking about the bleachery on our way to work one morning. Mrs. Hall had been a forelady in a New York private dressmaking establishment. She had what is called “style and personality.” Her wages in New York had been thirty-five dollars a week, and she had much variety and responsibility, which she loved. Circumstances brought her to the Falls. She had never worked in a factory; the very idea had appalled her, yet she must work. One day she went up to Department 10 to see what it was all like. “Why,” she said, “it took my breath away! I felt as if I was in one of those lovely rooms where they did Red Cross work during the war. Of course I get only a small amount a week and it's the same thing over and over again, and after what I was used to in New York that's hard. But it never seems like I was in a factory, somehow.”