Fact'ry 'Ands by Edward Dyson

THERE was something amiss; the crowded factory room was quick with the sense of it. A stranger coming up the stairs might have been visited with a consciousness of the fact that the spirit of mischief was stirring on the top flat. Spats' Beauties, girls of a kind commonly given to rebellious and frivolous practices, had preserved for over an hour the decorum of a superior young ladies' seminary under a Presbyterian regime.

The foreman clawed his fuzzy hair, and showed a cowering back. The quiet was ominous. Nothing was heard but the whir and whiz of the machines, the fluttering of busy hands in paper, and a sibilant whispering peculiarly viperish. Spats' girls did not usually whisper; their ordinary conversation was shrill and over-bearing, and there were at least eighty of them, young and old. Factory girls, like those of the ballet, remain "girls" in defiance of time and the ravages thereof.