"What do you think about all day?"
"Why, I couldn't even begin to tell all my thoughts."
"Tell me some."
"Why, I think about books, I reckon. Do you-all like readin'?"
"Yes."
"Ain't nuthin' I like so good when I ain't tyrd."
"Are you often tired?" And this question surprises her. She looks up at me and smiles. "Why, I'm always tyrd! I read novels for the most part; like to read love stories and about fo'ran travel."
(For one short moment please consider: This hemmed-in life, this limited existence, encompassed on all sides by the warfare and battle and din of
maddening sounds, vibrations around her during twelve hours of the day, vibrations which, mean that her food is being gained by each pulse of the engine and its ratio marked off by the disk at her side. Before her the scene is unchanged day after day, month after month, year after year. It is not an experience to this woman who works beside me so patiently; it is her life. The forms she sees are warped and scarred; the intellects with which she comes in contact are dulled and undeveloped. All they know is toil, all they know of gain is a fluctuation in a wage that ranges from cents to a dollar and cents again, never touching a two-dollar mark. The children who, barefooted, filthy, brush past her, sweeping the cotton from the infected floors, these are the only forms of childhood she has ever seen. The dirty women around her, low-browed, sensual, are the forms of womanhood that she knows; and the men? If she does not feed the passion of the overseer, she may find some mill-hand who will contract a "mill marriage" with this daughter of the loom, a marriage little binding to him and which will give her children to give in time to the mill. This is the realism of her love story: She reads books that you, too, may have read; she dares to dream of scenes, to picture them—scenes that you have sought and wearied of. A tithe of our satiety would mean her banquet, her salvation!... Her happiness? That question who can answer for her or for you?)
She continues: "I'm very fond of fo'ran travel, only I ain't never had much occasion for it."