inscrutable beings who had helped to invent and construct the astounding
organism, began in a low voice on the forlorn hope of making me
comprehend the mechanism of a telephone-call and its response. And I
began on the forlorn hope of persuading him by intelligent acting that I
did comprehend. We each made a little progress. I could not tell him
that, though I genuinely and humbly admired his particular variety of
genius, what interested me in the affair was not the mechanics, but the
human equation. As a professional reader of faces, I glanced as well as
I could sideways at those bent girls' faces to see if they were happy.
An absurd inquiry! Do _I_ look happy when I'm at work, I wonder! Did
they then look reasonably content? Well, I came to the conclusion that
they looked like most other faces--neither one thing nor the other.
Still, in a great establishment, I would sooner search for sociological
information in the faces of the employed than in the managerial rules.

"What do they earn?" I asked, when we emerged from the ten-atmosphere
pressure of that intense absorption. (Of course I knew that no young
women could possibly for any length of time be as intensely absorbed as
these appeared to be. But the illusion was there, and it was effective.)

I learned that even the lowest beginner earned five dollars a week. It
was just the sum I was paying for a pair of clean sheets every night at
a grand hotel. And that the salary rose to six, seven, eight, eleven,
and even fourteen dollars for supervisors, who, however, had to stand on
their feet seven and a half hours a day, as shop-girls do for ten hours
a day; and that in general the girls had thirty minutes for lunch, and a
day off every week, and that the Company supplied them gratuitously with
tea, coffee, sugar, couches, newspapers, arm-chairs, and fresh air, of
which last fifty fresh cubic feet were pumped in for every operator
every minute.