Elizabeth Jordan

“ I don't believe a single girl moved a single muscle, and when you remember that there were eighty girls and more than four thousand muscles, you'd better believe it was a strain to see them all, as it were, in disuse. I never felt so odd in my life.
Mother Mary Caroline rose, and again every girl rose with her. ”

“ She is old—as much as fifty, I should think—and thin, and she has a face like a white rose that has faded, and brown eyes that always look tired. But she is very gracious and dignified, and she acts like what she is—a Frenchwoman with noble blood flowing through her veins. ”

“ The true Literary Artist writes of Life as it is, even when he has to plunge his pen into the quivering human heart to do it and write his words with Blood. Therefore, I continue.
In the beginning Mabel and Maudie were not very enthusiastic over the Motion-Study Club. They said they thought motion study was silly. But after I had talked to them, and Janet had made a lot of snapshots when they didn't know it, and I had read some of the man's book to them and told them all about the girl in the box-factory, they began to understand. ”

“ Janet's pictures gave me a very good idea. She had a camera, and I persuaded her to take snapshots of all the girls when they didn't know it but were wasting motions. These gave us what real writers call "powerful weapons." After we made a careful study of every girl, and wrote out a list of things she had to do regularly, we "enumerated all the motions required in that effort," as the author of the book advised, and we showed the girls that they were throwing away thousands of motions every day. ”

“ All we have to do in manual work, he said, is to shorten the distance the right hand has to move, and have the left hand in position to begin the next motion right off, and remember our "variables," and consider separately every element that affects the amount of work we are able to turn out. ”

“ Katharine's we are not supposed to do a single thing to our features after the dressing-hour, except to make them reflect what Sister Edna calls "a quick and eager intelligence."
The very morning I talked to her, Mabel stopped pulling her mouth, and I pointed out to her at noon that she had saved seventy-three motions. The same morning Maudie had saved two hundred and seventeen motions by not dusting and arranging her desk as usual, but I was not so much gratified with this result. It "left much to be desired," as Sister Irmingarde says about our recitations. ”

“ But he pointed out how much she could earn by making seventy-two boxes instead of thirty-five, and he showed her how to do it and to save her motions instead of throwing them carelessly around the factory, as it were. (I put in that "as it were" without thinking, and now I know that when I did it I wasted eighteen motions, for the words were not necessary. Motion study makes life seem terribly serious.) ”