"I am sick of the shoe-shops."
"How long have you been at this work?"
"Ten years. When you have worked ten years in Lynn you will be sick of the shops."
I was sick of the shops, and I had not worked ten years. And for my hard-toiling future, such as she imagined that it would be, I could see that she pitied me. Once, supposing that since I am so green and so ill-clad, and so evidently bent on learning my trade the best I knew, she asked me in a voice quick with sisterhood:
"Say, are you hungry?"
"No, no, no."
"You'll be all right! No American girl need to starve in America."
In the shops the odours are more easily endured than is the noise. All conversation is shrieked out, and all the vision that one has as one lifts one's eyes from time to time is a sky seen through dirty window-panes, distant chimney-pots, and the roof-lines of like houses of toil.
I gathered this from our interrupted talk that flowed unceasingly despite the noise of our hammers and the noise of the general room.