Lyra interrupted them. "Well, I think now that Annie is here, we'd better
not let her get away without showing her the Works."
"Oh--oh--decidedly! I'll go with you, with great pleasure. Ah!" He bustled
about, putting the things together on his table, and then reaching for
the Panama hat on a hook behind it. There was something pathetic in his
eagerness to do what Lyra bade him, and Annie fancied in him the uneasy
consciousness which an elderly husband might feel in the presence of those
who met him for the first time with his young wife. At the outer office
door they encountered Jack Wilmington.
"I'll show them through," he said to his uncle; and the old man assented
with, "Well, perhaps you'd better, Jack," and went back to his room.
The Wilmington Stocking-Mills spun their own threads, and the first room
was like what Annie had seen before in cotton factories, with a faint
smell of oil from the machinery, and a fine snow of fluff in the air, and
catching to the white-washed walls and the foul window sashes. The tireless
machines marched back and forth across the floor, and the men who watched
them with suicidal intensity ran after them barefooted when they made
off with a broken thread, spliced it, and then escaped from them to
their stations again. In other rooms, where there was a stunning whir of
spindles, girls and women were at work; they looked after Lyra and her
nephew from under cotton-frowsed bangs; they all seemed to know her, and
returned her easy, kindly greetings with an effect of liking. From time to
time, at Lyra's bidding, the young fellow explained to Annie some curious
feature of the processes; in the room where the stockings were knitted she
tried to understand the machinery that wrought and seemed to live before
her eyes. But her mind wandered to the men and women who were operating it,
and who seemed no more a voluntary part of it than all the rest, except
when Jack Wilmington curtly ordered them to do this or that in illustration
of some point he was explaining. She wearied herself, as people do in such
places, in expressing her wonder at the ingenuity of the machinery; it was
a relief to get away from it all into the room, cool and quiet, where half
a dozen neat girls were counting and stamping the stockings with different
numbers. "Here's where _I_ used to work," said Lyra, "and here's
where I first met Mr. Wilmington. The place is _full_ of romantic
associations. The stockings are all one _size_, Annie; but people like
to wear different numbers, and so we try to gratify them. Which number do
_you_ wear? Or don't you wear the Wilmington machine-knit? _I_
don't. Well, they're not _dreams_ exactly, Annie, when all's said and
done for them."