A People's Man by E. Phillips Oppenheim — Read

Those wonderful few days at Manchester had passed, and oppressed by the inevitable reaction, Julia was back at work in the clothing factory.

She had given up her place by the window to an anaemic-looking child of seventeen, who had a habit of fainting during these long, summer afternoons. Her own fingers were weary and she was conscious of an increasing fatigue as the hours of toil passed on. No breath of air came in from the sun-baked streets through the wide-flung windows. The atmosphere of the long, low room, in which over a hundred girls closely huddled together, were working, was sickly with the smell of cloth. There was no conversation. The click of the machines seemed sometimes to her partially dulled senses like the beating out of their human lives. It seemed impossible that the afternoon would ever end. The interval for tea came and passed -- tea in tin cans, with thick bread and melting butter. The respite was worse almost than the mechanical toil. Julia's eyes ranged over the housetops, westwards. There was another world of trees, flowers, and breezes; another world altogether. She set her teeth.