led up to it--very steep steps, that trembled a little under
a repetition of shocks that came from above. Fanny climbed
them warily, gained the top, and found herself standing next
to the girl whose face had gleamed out at her from among
those thousands in the crowd pouring out of the plant.
The girl glanced up at Fanny for a second--no, for the
fraction of a second. Her job was the kind that permitted
no more than that. Fanny watched her for one breathless
moment. In that moment she understood the look that had
been stamped on the girl's face that night; the look that
had cried: "Release!" For this platform, shaking under the
thud of bundles, bundles, bundles, was the stomach of the
Haynes-Cooper plant. Sixty per cent of the forty-five
thousand daily orders passed through the hands of this girl
and her assistants. Down the chutes swished the bundles,
stamped with their section mark, and here they were caught
deftly and hurled into one of the dozen conveyers that
flowed out from this main stream. The wrong bundle into the
wrong conveyer? Confusion in the shipping room. It only
took a glance of the eye and a motion of the arms. But that
glance and that motion had been boiled down to the very
concentrated essence of economy. They seemed to be working
with fury, but then, so does a pile-driver until you get the
simplicity of it.

Fanny bent over the girl (it was a noisy corner) and put a
question. The girl did not pause in her work as she
answered it. She caught a bundle with one hand, hurled one
into a conveyer with the other.