Ex Machina

After she had become accustomed to the smell of rancid oil and
dyestuffs and the interminable racket of machinery she did not find
her work at the knitting mill disagreeable. It was like any work, she
imagined, an uninteresting task which had to be done.

The majority of the girls and young men of the village worked there in
various capacities; wages were fair, salaries better, union
regulations prevailed. There was nothing to complain of.

And nothing to expect except possible increase in wages, holidays, and
a disquieting chance of getting caught in the machinery, which
familiarity soon discounted.

As for the social status of the mill workers, the mill was Gayfield;
and Gayfield was a village where the simpler traditions of the
Republic still survived; where there existed no invidious distinction
in vocations; a typical old-time community harbouring the remains of a
Grand Army Post and too many churches of too many denominations; where
the chance metropolitan stranger was systematically "done"; where
distrust of all cities and desire to live in them was equalled only by
a passion for moving pictures and automobiles; where the school
trustees used double negatives and traced their ancestry to Colonial
considerables--who, however, had signed their names in "lower case" or
with a Maltese cross--the world in miniature, with its due proportion
of petty graft, petty squabbles, envy, kindness, jealousy, generosity,
laziness, ambition, stupidity, intelligence, honesty, hypocrisy,
hatred, affection, badness and goodness, as standardised by the code
established according to folk-ways on earth--in brief, a perfectly
human community composed of the usual ingredients, worthy and
unworthy--that was Gayfield, Mohawk County, New York.