He looked a little surprised at the
question, but answered promptly and with dignity, "I always take
off my hat to ladies."
His courtesy was genuine. Still, we did not call ourselves
ladies. We did not forget that we were working-girls, wearing
coarse aprons suitable to our work, and that there was some
danger of our becoming drudges. I know that sometimes the
confinement of the mill became very wearisome to me. In the sweet
June weather I would lean far out of the window, and try not to
hear the unceasing clash of sound inside. Looking away to the
hills, my whole stifled being would cry out
"Oh, that I had wings!"
Still I was there from choice, and
"The prison unto which we doom ourselves,
No prison is."
And I was every day making discoveries about life, and about
myself. I had naturally some elements of the recluse, and would
never, of my own choice, have lived in a crowd. I loved quiet-
ness. The noise of machinery was particularly distasteful to me.
But I found that the crowd was made up of single human lives, not
one of them wholly uninteresting, when separately known.
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