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exact--not mechanical, but "natural"--and it was found that the most
pleasing arrangement of pattern irregularity was obtained by employing
women of refinement and natural taste to punch out the patterns with
small dies. So many square feet of plates was exacted from Elizabeth as
a minimum, and for whatever square feet she did in excess she received a
small payment. The room, like most rooms of women workers, was under a
manageress: men had been found by the Labour Company not only less
exacting but extremely liable to excuse favoured ladies from a proper
share of their duties. The manageress was a not unkindly, taciturn
person, with the hardened remains of beauty of the brunette type; and
the other women workers, who of course hated her, associated her name
scandalously with one of the metal-work directors in order to explain
her position.
Only two or three of Elizabeth's fellow-workers were born labour serfs;
plain, morose girls, but most of them corresponded to what the
nineteenth century would have called a "reduced" gentlewoman. But the
ideal of what constituted a gentlewoman had altered: the faint, faded,
negative virtue, the modulated voice and restrained gesture of the
old-fashioned gentlewoman had vanished from the earth. Most of her
companions showed in discoloured hair, ruined complexions, and the
texture of their reminiscent conversations, the vanished glories of a
conquering youth. All of these artistic workers were much older than
Elizabeth, and two openly expressed their surprise that any one so young
and pleasant should come to share their toil. But Elizabeth did not
trouble them with her old-world moral conceptions.
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