The Noise of the World by Adriana Spadoni

On the following Monday Anne found a position with a fruit commission house on Front Street. The salary was not quite what she had hoped, but the surroundings were so different from the office of Lowell & Morrison that she was glad to take it.

Here there were no soft rugs, no quietly closing doors, or smoothly running elevators; no suave and courtly men. Great drays rumbled through the street outside; loud-voiced men called orders in strange, foreign tongues. For the first hours of the morning the warehouse shook with the thud of huge crates being thrown from trucks, trundled through the cool darkness of the shed and piled high to the shadow of the roof. In the afternoon the rumble of the drays loading and unloading ceased; many of the men went home; the place was quiet. Anne could hear the whistle of the boats at the wharves, and on foggy days the wail of the fog sirens very near.