Mrs. Bedlow turned back toward the low south building and knocked on a door marked “Agent.”

“I’ve brought you a new girl,” she said cheerily to the young man who opened the door. “Fresh from the farm and very healthy, as you can see.”

The young man hardly gave Lyddie a glance, but stepped back and held the door for them to come in. “I’ll see if Mr. Graves can spare a minute,” he said haughtily.

“These clerks do put on airs,” Mrs. Bedlow whispered, but if she was trying to make Lyddie feel more at ease, she failed. Nor was the sight of the agent himself any comfort.

“Mrs. Bedlow, isn’t it?” He was a fat, prosperous-looking man, but without the manners to stand when a middle-aged lady came into his office.

Mrs. Bedlow talked very fast, her face flushed. Lyddie was sure the man would turn them both away—he looked barely patient as Mrs. Bedlow rattled on. But in the end, he said he would give Lyddie a contract for one year. There was a shortage in the weaving room at the moment. Mr. Thurston, the clerk, would give the girl the broadside with the regulations for the Concord and arrange for her to have her smallpox vaccination the following morning.

They were dismissed with a nod. Mrs. Bedlow punched Lyddie and prompted her to thank the agent for his kindness. Lyddie’s voice could hardly manage a whisper, but it didn’t matter. The gentleman wasn’t paying her any attention.

She signed the paper where the clerk pointed, tried to listen carefully to all his warnings about what the contract demanded, and stuffed the broadside that he handed her into her apron pocket. She would study it tonight, she decided, her heart sinking. She could tell at a glance that it would be almost impossible for her to make out the meaning of such a paper. Oh, if only Charlie were here to read it aloud to her and explain the long words. Factory girls were not supposed to be ignorant, it would seem.

It would be several months before she could read with ease the “Regulations for the Boarding Houses of the Concord Corporation.” But she found out the next day that it concealed unpleasant truths. The first of these was the vaccination. Mrs. Bedlow marched her over to the hospital after dinner where a doctor cruelly gouged her leg and poured a mysterious liquid directly into the wound.

Lyddie was even more distressed when the wound turned into a nasty sore in a few days’ time, but she was only laughed at for her distress and told it was all for her own good. She’d never get the pox now, so she should be grateful. Amelia, indeed, was always instructing her to be grateful about things that Lyddie, try as she might, could not summon the least whiff of gratitude over. But finally, when she had been alternately shocked and bored for the better part of two weeks, the announcement was made at supper that work was to begin again the next day, and Lyddie felt a surge of gratitude that her days of idleness were over. She would be a true factory girl in a few hours’ time.