Page:Our Girls.pdf/103

 London factories, where the female workers are relatively few (some three or four hundred), and therefore know all about each other's affairs, there is a story that seems well worth telling. It is of a girl named Lily Something, commonly called Lil. She was a delicate, fair-haired little thing, only eighteen years of age, and before the war she had been, I think, a junior teacher in a neighbouring Council School. Lil's sweetheart had been William Somebody, commonly called Will, twenty years of age, a bookbinder in the factory (a bindery in pre-war days), and not quite out of his time. They had not meant to be married for a year or two, but the Military Service Act came, calling up unmarried men, so Will had joined up, been put into training for a short period, and then ordered to the front. A day or two before going Will had persuaded Lil that they ought to be married, and after he was gone, Lil, to keep herself from worrying, had applied for work at his factory, where they were now making