Is one to write of factory life as one finds it, or expurgated? I can hear the upbringers cry “expurgated”! Yet the way the girls talked was one of the phases of the life which set the stamp of difference on it all. What an infinitesimal portion of the population write our books! What a small proportion ever read them! How much of the nation's talking is done by the people who never get into print! The proportion who read and write books, especially the female folk, live and die in the belief that it is the worst sort of bad taste, putting it mildly, to use the name of the Creator in vain, or mention hell for any purpose whatsoever. Yet suddenly, overnight, you find yourself in a group who would snap their fingers at such notions. Sweet-faced, curly-headed Annie wants another box of caramels. Elizabeth Witherspoon would call, “Fannie, would you be so kind as to bring me another box of caramels?” Annie, without stopping her work or so much as looking up, raises her voice and calls down the room—and in her heart she is the same exactly as Elizabeth W.—“Fannie, you bum, bring me a box of car'mels or I'll knock the hell clean out o' ya.”
According to Elizabeth's notions Fannie should answer her, “One moment, Miss Elizabeth; I'm busy just now.” What Fannie (with her soul as pure as drifted snow) does call back to Annie is, “My Gawd! Keep your mouth shut. 'Ain't you got sense enough to see I'm busy!”
Annie could holler a hundred times, and she does, that she'd knock the hell out of Fannie, and God would love her every bit as much as he would love Miss Elizabeth Witherspoon, who has been taught otherwise and never said hell in her life, not even in a dark closet. Fannie and all the other Fannies and Idas and Louisas, say, “My Gawd!” as Miss Elizabeth says “You don't say!” and it is all one to the Heavenly Father. Therefore, gentle reader, it must be all one to you. There is not the slightest shade of disrespect in Annie's or Fannie's hearts as they shower their profanity on creation in general. There is not the slightest shade in mind as I write of them.
So then, back that first day Lena asked, “Where'd ya work last?”
“No, I 'ain't.” (Gulp.) “I took care of kids.”
“Lena!” hollers Ida. “Get ta work and don't talk so much!” Whereat Lena gives me another poke in my cold ribs and departs. And Tessie and I pack “assorteds”: four different chocolates in the bottom of each box, four still different ones in the top—about three hundred and fifty boxes on our table. We puff and labor on the top layer and Ida breezes along. “My Gawd! Look at that! Where's your cardboards?”