bridges flung at intervals across the water, lacking only chains to raise
them in case of siege. The place was always ominously suggestive of
impending strife. Janet's soul was a sensitive instrument, but she
suffered from an inability to find parallels, and thus to translate her
impressions intellectually. Her feeling about the mills was that they
were at once fortress and prison, and she a slave driven thither day
after day by an all-compelling power; as much a slave as those who
trooped in through the gates in the winter dawn, and wore down, four
times a day, the oak treads of the circular tower stairs.

The sound of the looms was like heavy rain hissing on the waters of the
canal.

The administrative offices of a giant mill such as the Chippering in
Hampton are labyrinthine. Janet did not enter by the great gates her
father kept, but walked through an open courtyard into a vestibule where,
day and night, a watchman stood; she climbed iron-shod stairs, passed the
doorway leading to the paymaster's suite, to catch a glimpse, behind the
grill, of numerous young men settling down at those mysterious and
complicated machines that kept so unerring a record, in dollars and
cents, of the human labour of the operatives. There were other suites for
the superintendents, for the purchasing agent; and at the end of the
corridor, on the south side of the mill, she entered the outer of the two
rooms reserved for Mr. Claude Ditmar, the Agent and general-in-chief
himself of this vast establishment. In this outer office, behind the rail
that ran the length of it, Janet worked; from the window where her
typewriter stood was a sheer drop of eighty feet or so to the river,
which ran here swiftly through a wide canon whose sides were formed by
miles and miles of mills, built on buttressed stone walls to retain the
banks. The prison-like buildings on the farther shore were also of