The girls didn’t seem afraid or even amazed. As she walked by with the overseer, girls glanced up. A few smiled, some stared. No one seemed to mind the deafening din. How could they stand it? She had thought a single stagecoach struggling to hold back the horses on a downhill run was unbearably noisy. A single stagecoach! A factory was a hundred stagecoaches all inside one’s skull, banging their wheels against the bone. Her impulse was to turn and run to the door, down the rickety stairs, through the yard and counting room, across the narrow bridge, past the row of boardinghouses, down the street—out of this hellish city and back, back, back to the green hills and quiet pastures.

But of course she didn’t move a step. She didn’t even cover her ears against the assault. She just stood quietly in front of the machine that the overseer had led her to and pretended she could hear what he was saying to her. His mouth was moving, a strange little red mouth peeping out from under his bushy black mustache. The luxuriant growth of the mustache was all the more peculiar because the overseer had hardly any hair on his head. His pate gleamed like polished wood.

Suddenly, to Lyddie’s astonishment, the man put his red mouth quite close to her ear. She jerked her head away before she realized he was shouting the words: “Is that quite clear?”

Lyddie stared at him in terror. Nothing was clear at all. What did the man mean? Did he seriously think she could possibly have heard any of his mysterious mouthings? But how could she say she had heard nothing but the beastly racket of the looms? How could she say she could see hardly anything in the morning gloom of the huge, barnlike room, the very air a soup of dust and lint?

She was simply standing there, her mouth open with no words coming out, when an arm went around her shoulders. She shrank again from the touch before she saw it was one of the young women who tended the looms. Her head was close enough to Lyddie’s left ear so that Lyddie could hear her say to the overseer, “Don’t worry, Mr. Marsden, I’ll see she settles in.”

The overseer nodded, obviously relieved not to have to deal with Lyddie or the loom he’d assigned her.

“We’ll work together,” the girl shouted in her ear. “My two machines are just next to you here. I’m Diana.” She motioned for Lyddie to stand close behind her right shoulder, so although Lyddie wasn’t in her way as she worked, the older girl could speak into Lyddie’s left ear by turning her head slightly to the right.