This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
72
OUR GIRLS

finger squeezed or cut in her lathe she likes her chum to sympathize with her and carry her off to the factory infirmary—often a fresh, sweet place, presided over by trained nurses, who dress slight wounds all day long and provide easy chairs and rest rooms for girls who are faint from charcoal fumes or sick from sniffs of some greenish compound. And though Alice and Annie and Rose are usually brave enough on the nights of air-raids, they sometimes have bouts of hysteria which have to be put down with an iron hand. One such operation was delightfully ludicrous. A forewoman at a great factory, having received notice of the coming of Zeppelins, removed her girls to the wash-room, where some of them began to cry. "Stop that," she cried, but the hysterical girls would not or could not stop. So she picked them up, one by one, and put them to sit in the wash basins that lined two sides of the room, and then called in a number of the men to look at them. The lights were switched