There are two great whippers-in in the child slavery of the South—the mills which employ the children and the parents who permit it—encourage it. Of these two the parents are often the worse, for, since the late enactment of child labor laws, they do not hesitate to stultify themselves by false affidavits as to the child's real age.
Kingsley had often noticed how promptly and even proudly the girls, after reaching eighteen, and the boys twenty-one, had told him hereafter to place their wages to their own credit, and not to the parent's. They seemed to take a new lease on life. Decrepit, drawn-faced, hump-shouldered and dried up before their time, the few who reached the age when the law made them their own masters, looked not like men and women who stand on the threshold of life, but rather like over-worked middle-aged beings of another period.
Yet that day their faces put on a brighter look.
They stood around the office desk, awaiting their turn. The big engine had ceased to throb and the shuttles to clatter and whirl. The mill was so quiet that those who had, year in and year out, listened to its clatter and hum, seemed to think some overhanging calamity was about to drop out of the sky of terrible calm.
“Janette Smith,” called out Kingsley.
She came forward, a bony, stoop-shouldered woman of thirty-five years who had been a spooler since she was fifteen.
“Seventy-seven hours for the week”—he went on mechanically, studying the time book, “making six dollars and sixteen cents. Rent deducted two dollars. Wood thirty-five cents. Due commissary for goods furnished—here, Mr. Kidd,” he said to the book-keeper, “let me see Miss Smith's account.” It was shoved to him across the desk. Kingsley elevated his glasses. Then he adjusted them with a peculiar lilt—it was his way of being ironical:
“Oh, you don't owe the store anything, Miss Smith—just eleven dollars and eighty cents.”
The woman stood stoically—not a muscle moved in her face, and not even by the change of an eye did she indicate that such a thing as the ordinary human emotions of disappointment and fear had a home in the heart.
“Mother was sick all last month,” she said at last in a voice that came out in the same indifferent, unvarying tone. “I had to overdraw.”