Edna Ferber: Fanny Herself

13. CHAPTER THIRTEEN (continued)

"None of your business," she said to herself, and continued her tour. "None of your business." She went up to the new selectors' floor, and found the plan running as smoothly as if it had been part of the plant's system for years. The elevator whisked her up to the top floor, where she met the plant's latest practical fad, the new textile chemist--a charming youth, disguised in bone-rimmed glasses, who did the honors of his little labratory with all the manner of a Harvard host. This was the fusing oven for silks. Here was the drying oven. This delicate scale weighed every ounce of the cloth swatches that came in for inspection, to get the percentage of wool and cotton. Not a chance for the manufacturer to slip shoddy into his goods, now.

"Mm," said Fanny, politely. She hated complicated processes that had to do with scales, and weights, and pounds, and acids. She crossed over to the Administration Building, and stopped at the door marked, "Mrs. Knowles." If you had been an employee of the Haynes-Cooper company, and had been asked to define Mrs. Knowles's position the chances are that you would have found yourself floundering, wordless. Haynes-Cooper was reluctant to acknowledge the need of Mrs. Knowles. Still, when you employ ten thousand people, and more than half of these are girls, and fifty per cent of these girls are unskilled, ignorant, and terribly human you find that a Mrs. Knowles saves the equivalent of ten times her salary in wear and tear and general prevention. She could have told you tragic stories, could Mrs. Knowles, and sordid stories, and comic too; she knew how to deal with terror, and shame, and stubborn silence, and hopeless misery. Gray-haired and motherly? Not at all. An astonishingly young, pleasingly plumpish woman, with nothing remarkable about her except a certain splendid calm. Four years out of Vassar, and already she had learned that if you fold your hands in your lap and wait, quietly, asking no questions, almost any one will tell you almost anything.

"Hello!" called Fanny. "How are our morals this morning?"

"Going up!" answered Esther Knowles, "considering that it's Tuesday. Come in. How's the infant prodigy, I lunched with Ella Monahan, and she told me your first New York trip was a whirlwind. Congratulations!"