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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Long Day, by Dorothy Richardson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Long Day
+       The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself
+
+
+Author: Dorothy Richardson
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 29, 2010  [eBook #31118]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONG DAY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Martin Pettit, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustration.
+      See 31118-h.htm or 31118-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31118/31118-h/31118-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31118/31118-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LONG DAY
+
+The Story of a New York Working Girl * * As Told by Herself
+
+[Illustration: Logo]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+The Century Co.
+1905
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Copyright, 1905, by The Century Co.
+
+Published October, 1905
+
+The Devinne Press
+
+
+
+
+TO MY THREE "LADY-FRIENDS"
+
+Happy, fortunate Minnie; Bessie, of gentle memory; and that other,
+silent figure in the tragedy of Failure, the long-lost, erring Eunice,
+with the hope that, if she still lives, her eye may chance to fall upon
+this page, and reading the message of this book, she may heed.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                 PAGE
+
+   I IN WHICH I ARRIVE IN NEW YORK                         3
+
+  II IN WHICH I START OUT IN QUEST OF WORK                16
+
+ III I TRY "LIGHT" HOUSEKEEPING IN A FOURTEENTH-STREET
+       LODGING-HOUSE                                      27
+
+  IV WHEREIN FATE BRINGS ME GOOD FORTUNE IN ONE HAND
+       AND DISASTER IN THE OTHER                          44
+
+   V IN WHICH I AM "LEARNED" BY PHOEBE IN THE ART
+       OF BOX-MAKING                                      58
+
+  VI IN WHICH PHOEBE AND MRS. SMITH HOLD FORTH UPON
+       MUSIC AND LITERATURE                               75
+
+ VII IN WHICH I ACQUIRE A STORY-BOOK NAME AND MAKE
+       THE ACQUAINTANCE OF MISS HENRIETTA MANNERS         92
+
+VIII WHEREIN I WALK THROUGH DARK AND DEVIOUS WAYS
+       WITH HENRIETTA MANNERS                            108
+
+  IX INTRODUCING HENRIETTA'S "SPECIAL GENTLEMAN-FRIEND"  123
+
+   X IN WHICH I FIND MYSELF A HOMELESS WANDERER
+       IN THE NIGHT                                      142
+
+  XI I BECOME AN "INMATE" OF A HOME FOR WORKING GIRLS    151
+
+ XII IN WHICH I SPEND A HAPPY FOUR WEEKS MAKING
+       ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS                                180
+
+XIII THREE "LADY-FRIENDS," AND THE ADVENTURES THAT
+       BEFALL THEM                                       197
+
+ XIV IN WHICH A TRAGIC FATE OVERTAKES MY "LADY-FRIENDS"  215
+
+  XV I BECOME A "SHAKER" IN A STEAM-LAUNDRY              229
+
+ XVI IN WHICH IT IS PROVED TO ME THAT THE DARKEST HOUR
+  COMES JUST BEFORE THE DAWN                             249
+
+     EPILOGUE                                            266
+
+
+
+
+THE LONG DAY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+IN WHICH I ARRIVE IN NEW YORK
+
+
+The rain was falling in great gray blobs upon the skylight of the little
+room in which I opened my eyes on that February morning whence dates the
+chronological beginning of this autobiography. The jangle of a bell had
+awakened me, and its harsh, discordant echoes were still trembling upon
+the chill gloom of the daybreak. Lying there, I wondered whether I had
+really heard a bell ringing, or had only dreamed it. Everything about me
+was so strange, so painfully new. Never before had I waked to find
+myself in that dreary, windowless little room, and never before had I
+lain in that narrow, unfriendly bed.
+
+Staring hard at the streaming skylight, I tried to think, to recall some
+one of the circumstances that might possibly account for my having
+entered that room and for my having laid me down on that cot. When? and
+how? and why? How inexplicable it all was in those first dazed moments
+after that rude awakening! And then, as the fantasies of a dream
+gradually assume a certain vague order in the waking recollection, there
+came to me a confused consciousness of the events of the preceding
+twenty-four hours--the long journey and the weariness of it; the
+interminable frieze of flying landscape, with its dreary, snow-covered
+stretches blurred with black towns; the shriek of the locomotive as it
+plunged through the darkness; the tolling of ferry-bells, and then, at
+last, the slow sailing over a black river toward and into a giant city
+that hung splendid upon the purple night, turret upon turret, and tower
+upon tower, their myriad lights burning side by side with the stars, a
+city such as the prophets saw in visions, a city such as dreamy
+childhood conjures up in the muster of summer clouds at sunset.
+
+Suddenly out of this chaotic recollection of unearthly splendors came
+the memory, sharp and pinching, of a new-made grave on a wind-swept hill
+in western Pennsylvania. With equal suddenness, too, the fugue of
+thundering locomotives, and shrieking whistles, and sad, sweet tollings
+of ferry-bells massed itself into the clangorous music of a terrifying
+monody--"WORK OR STARVE, WORK OR STARVE!"
+
+And then I remembered! An unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl
+of eighteen, utterly alone in the world, I was a stranger in a strange
+city which I had not yet so much as seen by daylight. I was a waif and a
+stray in the mighty city of New York. Here I had come to live and to
+toil--out of the placid monotony of a country town into the storm and
+stress of the wide, wide, workaday world. Very wide awake now, I jumped
+out of bed upon the cold oil-cloth and touched a match to the pile of
+paper and kindling-wood in the small stove. There was a little puddle of
+water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip in
+falling had brushed against the sleeve of my shirt-waist and soaked into
+the soles of my only pair of shoes. I dressed as quickly as the cold and
+my sodden garments permitted. On the washstand I found a small tin ewer
+and a small tin basin to match, and I dabbed myself gingerly in the
+cold, stale water.
+
+Another jangle of the harsh bell, and I went down dark stairs to the
+basement and to breakfast, wondering if I should be able to recognize
+Miss Jamison; for I had caught but a glimpse of my new landlady on my
+arrival the previous midnight. Wrapped in a faded French flannel
+kimono, her face smeared with cold cream, her hair done up in curling
+"kids," she had met and arranged terms with me on the landing in front
+of her bedroom door as the housemaid conducted me aloft. Making due
+allowance for the youth-and-beauty-destroying effects of the kimono,
+curling "kids," and cold cream, and substituting in their stead a snug
+corset, an undulated pompadour, and a powdered countenance,
+respectively, I knew about what to look for in the daylight Miss
+Jamison. A short, plump, blonde lady in the middle forties, I predicted
+to myself. The secretary of the Young Women's Christian Association, to
+which I had written some weeks before for information as to respectable
+and cheap boarding-houses, had responded with a number of names and
+addresses, among them that of Miss Elmira Jamison, "a lady of very high
+Christian ideals."
+
+Miss Jamison was no disappointment. She fulfilled perfectly all my
+preconceived notions of what she would look like when properly attired.
+Spying me the moment I got inside the dining-room door, she immediately
+pounced upon me and hurried me off to a seat, when a girl in a dirty
+white apron began to unload off a tray a clatter of small dishes under
+my nose, while another servant tossed a wet, warm napkin upon my plate.
+My breakfast consisted of heterogeneous little dabs of things in the
+collection of dishes, and which I ate with not the greatest relish in
+the world.
+
+There were several score of breakfasters in the two big rooms, which
+seemed to occupy the entire basement floor. They ate at little tables
+set uncomfortably close together. Gradually my general observations
+narrowed down to the people at my own table. I noticed a young man
+opposite who wore eye-glasses and a carefully brushed beard; an old
+lady, with a cataract in her left eye, who sat at the far end of the
+table; a little fidgety, stupid-looking, and very ugly woman who sat
+next the bearded young man; and a young girl, with dancing, roguish
+black eyes, who sat beside me. The bearded young man talked at a great
+rate, and judging from the cackling laughter of the fidgety woman and
+the intensely interested expression of the cataracted lady, the subject
+was one of absorbing interest.
+
+Gradually I discovered that the topic of discourse was none other than
+our common hostess and landlady; and gradually, too, I found myself
+listening to the history of Miss Elmira Jamison's career as a purveyor
+of bed and board to impecunious and homeless mortals.
+
+Five years ago Miss Jamison had come into this shabby though eminently
+respectable neighborhood, and opened a small boarding-house in a
+neighboring street. She had come from some up-State country town, and
+her bureaus and bedsteads were barely enough to furnish the small,
+old-fashioned house which she took for a term of years. Miss Jamison was
+a genius--a genius of the type peculiar to the age in which we live. She
+wasn't the "slob" that she looked. The epithet is not mine, but that of
+the young gentleman to whom I am indebted for this information. No,
+indeed; Miss Jamison was anything but a "slob," as one soon found out
+who had occasion to deal with her very long. A shrewd, exacting,
+penny-for-penny and dollar-for-dollar business woman was concealed under
+the mask of her good-natured face and air of motherly solicitude. Miss
+Jamison, at the very start-out of her career, was inspired to call her
+little "snide" boarding-house after the founder of the particular creed
+professed by the congregation of the neighboring church. The result was
+that "The Calvin" immediately became filled with homeless Presbyterians,
+or the homeless friends and acquaintances of Presbyterians. They not
+only filled her house, but they overflowed, and to preserve the overflow
+Miss Jamison rented the adjoining house.
+
+Miss Jamison was now a successful boarding-house keeper on a scale
+large enough to have satisfied the aspirations of a less clever woman.
+But she longed for other denominations to feed and house. Of the
+assortment that offered themselves, she chose the Methodists next, and
+soon had several flourishing houses running under the pious appellation
+"Wesley," which name, memorialized in large black letters on a brass
+sign, soon became a veritable magnet to board-seeking Methodism.
+
+The third and last venture of the energetic lady, and the one from which
+she was to derive her largest percentage of revenue, was the
+establishment of the place of which I had so recently become an inmate.
+Of all three of Miss Jamison's boarding-houses, this was the largest and
+withal the cheapest and most democratic: in which characteristics it but
+partook of the nature of the particular sort of church-going public it
+wished to attract, which was none other than the heterodox element which
+flocked in vast numbers to All People's church. The All People's edifice
+was a big, unsightly brick building. It had been originally designed for
+a roller-skating rink.
+
+All People's, as the church was colloquially named, was one of the most
+popular places of worship in the city. Every Sunday, both at morning and
+evening services, the big rink was packed to the doors with people who
+were attracted quite as much by the good music as they were by the
+popular preaching of the very popular divine. A large percentage of this
+great congregation was recruited from the transient element of
+population which lives in lodgings and boarding-houses. From its
+democracy and lack of all ceremony, it was a church which appealed
+particularly to those who were without ties or affiliations. Into this
+sanctuary the lonely young man (or girl) of a church-going temperament
+was almost sure to drift sooner or later if his probationary period of
+strangerhood happened to fall in this section of the city.
+
+The clever Miss Jamison put a sign bearing the legend, "All People's,"
+on each of the doors of six houses, opposite the church, which she
+acquired one by one as her business increased. The homeless and lonely
+who came to All People's for spiritual refreshment, or to gratify their
+curiosity, remained to patronize Miss Jamison's "special Sunday"
+thirty-five-cent table d'hôte, served in the basement of one house; or
+bought a meal-ticket for four dollars, which entitled them to twenty-one
+meals served in the basement of another of the houses; or for the sum of
+five dollars and upward insured themselves the privilege of a week's
+lodging and three meals a day served in still another of the basements.
+
+Such is the history of Miss Jamison as detailed at the breakfast-table
+that Sunday morning.
+
+I went out for a walk late in the afternoon, and wandered about,
+homesick and lonely. When I returned dinner was over and the dining-room
+almost deserted, only a few remaining to gossip over their dessert and
+coffee. At my table all had gone save the young girl with the dark eyes,
+who, I felt instinctively, was a very nice and agreeable girl. As I
+approached the table, she raised her eyes from the book she was reading
+and gave me a diffident little bow, when, seeing I was so glad to
+respond to it, she immediately smiled in a friendly way.
+
+From the glimpse I had caught of her during the morning meal, I had
+thought her very pretty in a smart, stiffly starched, mannish-looking
+shirt-waist. That night she looked even prettier, clad in a
+close-fitting cloth gown of dark wine-color. I noticed, too, as I sat
+down beside her, that she was an unusually big woman.
+
+"How do you like the boarding-house by this time?" she asked, with an
+encouraging smile, to which I responded as approvingly as I could in the
+remembrance of the cheerless hall bedroom far above, and in the
+presence of the unappetizing dinner spread before me.
+
+"Well, I think it's rotten, if you'll excuse my French," laughed Miss
+Plympton, as she cut a square of butter off the common dish and passed
+it to me. "And I guess you think so, too, only you're too polite to
+roast the grub like the rest of us do. But you'll get over that in time.
+I was just the same way when I first begun living in boarding-houses,
+but I've got bravely over that now.
+
+"I've been here just a little over a week myself," she went on in her
+frank and engaging manner. "I saw you this morning, and I just knew how
+you felt. I thought I'd die of homesickness when I came. Not a soul
+spoke to me for four days. Not that anybody would want to particularly
+get acquainted with these cattle, only I'm one of the sort that has got
+to have somebody to speak to. So this morning I said to myself, when I
+saw you, that I'd put on nerve and up and speak to you even if you did
+turn me down. And that's why I waited for you to-night."
+
+I responded that I was glad she had been so informal; absence of
+formality being the meaning I interpreted from her slang, which was much
+more up-to-date and much more vigorous than that to which I had been
+accustomed in the speech of a small country village. As I ate, we
+talked. We talked a little about a great many things in which we were
+not at all interested, and a very great deal about ourselves and the
+hazards of fortune which had brought our lives together and crossed them
+thus at Miss Jamison's supper-table,--subjects into which we entered
+with all the zest and happy egotism of youth. Of this egotism I had the
+greater preponderance, probably because of my three or four years' less
+experience of life. Before we rose from the table I had told Miss
+Plympton the story of my life as it had been lived thus far.
+
+Of her own story, all I knew was that she was a Westerner, that she had
+worked a while in Chicago, and had come to New York on a mission similar
+to my own--to look for a job. We went together to her room, which was as
+small and shabby as my own, and a few minutes later we were sitting
+round the little Jenny Lind stove, listening to the pleasant crackle of
+the freshly kindled fire. Both were silent for a few minutes. Then my
+new friend spoke.
+
+"What does that put you in mind of?" she asked slowly.
+
+"You mean the crackle of the kindling-wood and the snap of the coal as
+the flames begin to lick it?" I asked.
+
+"U-m-m, yes; the crackle of the wood and the snap of the coal," said the
+girl in a dreamy tone.
+
+"Home!" I cried, quick as a flash. "It makes me think of home--of the
+home I used to have," and my eyes blurred.
+
+"Here, too! Home!" she replied softly. "Funny, isn't it, that we have so
+many ideas exactly alike? But I suppose that's because we were both
+brought up in the country."
+
+"In the country!" I exclaimed in surprise. "I thought you were from
+Chicago."
+
+"Oh, no; I'm from the country. I didn't go to Chicago till I was twenty.
+I lived all my life on a farm in Iowa, till I went up to get a job in
+Chicago after my father died and I was all alone in the world. We lived
+in the very wildest part of the State--in the part they call the 'Big
+Woods.' Oh, I know all about frontier life. And there's hardly any kind
+of 'roughing it' that I haven't done. I was born to it."
+
+She laughed, opening the stove door, for the elbow of the pipe was now
+red-hot and threatening conflagration to the thin board partition
+behind, which divided the little room from that of the next lodger.
+
+A loud thump upon the board partition startled us. We listened for a
+few moments,--at first with alarm,--and then realized that the noise was
+only the protest of a sleepy boarder.
+
+Presently, as we continued to talk, the banging of a shoe-heel on the
+wall grew more insistent. We heard doors opening along the hall, and a
+high, raucous voice invoked quiet in none too polite phrase. So I said,
+"Good night," in a whisper and tiptoed to my own door.
+
+Thus began my acquaintance with Minnie Plympton--an acquaintance which,
+ripening later into a warm friendship, was to have an incalculable
+influence upon my life.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+IN WHICH I START OUT IN QUEST OF WORK
+
+
+When I woke up the next morning it was to find a weight of homesickness
+lying heavy upon my heart--homesickness for something which, alas! no
+longer existed save in memory. Then I remembered the girl on the floor
+below, and soon I was dressing with a light heart, eager to hurry down
+to breakfast. I was somewhat disappointed to find that she had eaten her
+breakfast and gone. I went out upon the stoop, hailed a newsboy, and
+sought my skylight bedroom.
+
+It was with a hope born of youth and inexperience that I now gave
+systematic attention to "HELP WANTED--Female." I will confess that at
+first I was ambitious to do only what I chose to esteem "lady-like"
+employment. I had taught one winter in the village school back home, and
+my pride and intelligence naturally prompted me to a desire to do
+something in which I could use my head, my tongue, my wits--anything,
+in fact, rather than my hands. The advertisements I answered all held
+out inducements of genteel or semi-genteel nature--ladies' companions;
+young women to read aloud to blind gentlemen and to invalids; assistants
+in doctors' and dentists' offices, and for the reception-room of
+photograph galleries. All of them requested answers in "own handwriting,
+by mail only." I replied to scores of such with no success.
+
+There was also another kind of illusive advertisement which I answered
+in prodigal numbers in the greenness of these early days. These were
+those deceitfully worded requests for "bright, intelligent ladies--no
+canvassing." And not less prodigal were the returns I got. They came in
+avalanches by every mail, from patent-medicine concerns,
+subscription-book publishers, novelty manufacturers--all in search of
+canvassers to peddle their trash.
+
+I might have saved much superfluous effort, and saved myself many
+postage-stamps, had I been fortunate enough to have had the advice of
+Miss Plympton throughout this first week. But Miss Plympton had gone
+away for several days. I had not seen her since we had parted on Sunday
+night; but Monday evening, when I went to the table, I found a hasty
+note saying she had gone out of town to see about a job, and would see
+me later. That was all. I found myself longing for her more and more as
+the week wore away.
+
+Meanwhile, however, I did not allow the sentiment of an interrupted
+acquaintance to interfere with my quest for a job, nor did I sit idle in
+Miss Jamison's boarding-house waiting for replies. I had only a few
+dollars in the world, and on the other side of those few dollars I saw
+starvation staring me in the face unless I found work very soon. I
+planned my search for work as systematically as I might have conducted a
+house-cleaning. As soon as each day's grist of "wants" was sifted and a
+certain quota disposed of by letter, I set out to make personal
+applications to such as required it. This I found to be an even more
+discouraging business than the epistolary process, as it was bitterly
+cold and the streets were filled with slush and snow. The distances were
+interminable, and each day found my little hoard dwindling away with
+frightful rapidity into innumerable car-fares and frequent cups of
+coffee at wayside lunch-counters. I traveled over miles and miles of
+territory, by trolley-car, by elevated train and ferry-boat, to
+Brooklyn, to Harlem, to Jersey City and Newark, only to reach my
+destination cold and hungry, and to be interviewed by a seedy man with
+a patent stove-lifter, a shirt-waist belt, a contrivance for holding up
+a lady's train, or a new-fangled mop--anything, everything that a
+persistent agent might sell to the spendthrift wife of an American
+workingman.
+
+By the end of the week I was obliged to hunt for another boarding-house
+as well as continue the search for work. My little bedroom under the
+skylight, and three meals per day of none too plentiful and wretchedly
+cooked food, required the deposit of five dollars a week in advance.
+With but a few dollars left in my purse, and the prospect of work still
+far off, nothing in the world seemed so desirable as that I might be
+able to pass the remainder of my days in Miss Jamison's house, and that
+I might be able to breakfast indefinitely in her dark basement
+dining-room.
+
+Sunday morning came around again. I had been a week in the city, and was
+apparently no nearer to earning a livelihood than the day I started out.
+I had gained a little experience, but it had been at the cost of nearly
+five precious dollars, all spent in street-car fare and postage-stamps;
+of miles and miles of walking through muddy, slushy streets; and at the
+sacrifice of my noon lunch, which I could have had done up for me at the
+boarding-house without extra charge, but which my silly vanity did not
+allow me to carry around under my arm.
+
+Sunday morning again, and still no Miss Plympton. She was under
+discussion when I reached the breakfast-table. The lady with the
+cataract and her friend were speaking of how well she always dressed,
+and one of them wondered how she managed to do it, since she had no
+visible means of support. Dr. Perkins didn't seem to relish the turn the
+conversation had taken, and suddenly he fell completely out of it. But
+the gossips clacked on regardless, until they were brought to a
+standstill by a peremptory exclamation from the end of the table.
+
+"Excuse me," spoke up the doctor, dryly, "but I'll have to ask you to
+change the subject. You are talking about a young lady of whom you know
+absolutely nothing!"
+
+The scandal-mongers finished breakfast in silence and soon shuffled away
+in their bedroom slippers.
+
+"Old cats!" said the doctor, energetically. "Boarding-house life breeds
+them. A boarding-house is no place for anybody. It perverts all the
+natural instincts, mental, moral, and physical. You'd hardly believe it,
+but I've lived in boarding-houses so long that I can't digest really
+wholesome food any more."
+
+When at last we rose to go, he handed me a card upon which I later read
+this astonishing inscription in heavy black type: "PAINLESS PERKINS";
+and, in smaller type underneath, the information that the extracting or
+filling of molars; crown and bridge work; or the fitting of artificial
+teeth, would be done by Painless Perkins in a "Particularly Pleasing
+Way," and that he was "Predisposed to Popular Prices."
+
+With no books to read, and no advertisements to answer, and no friend
+with whom to gossip, the day stretched before me a weary, dreary waste,
+when I happened to think of the church across the way, something of the
+history of which I had heard from Painless Perkins. And so I joined the
+crowd of strangers who were pouring into the doors of "All People's" to
+the music of a sweet-toned bell.
+
+I was there early, but the auditorium was packed, and I was ushered to a
+camp-chair in the aisle. The crowd was not suggestive of fashionable New
+York, though there were present many fine-looking, well-groomed men and
+women. But nearly everybody was neatly and decently if not well dressed.
+Many of the faces looked as sad and lonely as I felt. They appeared to
+be strangers--homeless wanderers who had come here to church not so much
+for worship as to come in touch with human beings. I was too tired, too
+discouraged even to hear what the earnest-voiced preacher said. The two
+girls sitting directly in front of me listened intently, as they passed
+a little bag of peppermints back and forth, and I envied them the
+friendship which that furtive bag of peppermints betokened. If I had had
+any prospect of getting a job the following week, I too could have
+listened to the preacher. As it was, my ears were attuned only to the
+terrifying refrain which had haunted me all week: "WORK OR STARVE, WORK
+OR STARVE!" After a while I tried to rouse myself and to take in the
+sermon which was holding the great congregation breathless. It was about
+the Good Samaritan. I heard a few sentences. Then the preacher's voice
+was lost once more in that insistent refrain.
+
+Dinner at noon and supper in the evening in the dark house across the
+street, and still my friend was absent. The scandal-mongers were as busy
+as ever, for Painless Perkins was away.
+
+Monday morning I made my way eastward on foot, across Union Square. The
+snow had been falling all night and was still sifting down in big,
+flowery flakes. The trees under their soft, feathery burdens looked like
+those that grow only in a child's picture-book. The slat-benches were
+covered with soft white blankets that were as yet undisturbed, for the
+habitual bench tramp was not abroad so early in the morning.
+
+I was up extraordinarily early, as I started out on a double search. The
+first item on my list--"Board and room, good neighborhood, $3.00"--took
+me south across Fourteenth Street, choked and congested with the morning
+traffic. The pavements were filled with hurrying crowds--factory-hands,
+mill-girls, mechanics--the vanguard of the great labor army. I hunted
+for Mrs. McGinniss's residence in a street which pays little attention
+to the formality of numbers. An interview with a milk-cart driver
+brought the discouraging news that I might find it somewhere between
+First and Second avenues, and I hurried on down the street, which
+stretched away and dipped in the far distance under the framework of the
+elevated railroad. The stoop-line on either side presented an
+interminable vista of small, squalid shops, meat-markets, and saloons.
+
+Wedged between a paper-box factory and a blacksmith's shop I found Mrs.
+McGinniss's number. It was a five-story red-brick tenement, like all the
+others that rise above the stoop-line of this poverty-stricken street. A
+soiled scrap of paper pasted beneath the button informed possible
+visitors that Mrs. McGinniss lived on the fifth floor, that her bell was
+out of order, and that one should "Push Guggenheim's."
+
+The Guggenheims responded with a click from above. I ascended a flight
+of dark stairs, at the top of which there was ranged an ambuscade of
+numerous small Guggenheims who had gushed out in their underdrawers and
+petticoats. Their mother, in curl-papers, gave explicit directions for
+my guidance upward.
+
+"Is this where Mrs. McGinniss lives?" I inquired of the dropsical
+slattern who responded to my rap.
+
+"I'm her."
+
+Mrs. McGinniss's manner was aggressive. Conscious of her bare, sodden
+arms and dripping gingham apron, she evidently supposed I had mistaken
+her for a laundress instead of the lady of her own house, and she showed
+her resentment by chilly reticence.
+
+"I don't run no boarding-house, and I don't take just any trash that
+come along, either."
+
+I agreed that these were excellent qualities in a landlady, and then,
+somewhat mollified, she led the way through a steamy passage into a
+stuffy bedroom. It had one window, looking out into an air-shaft filled
+with lines of fluttering garments and a network of fire-escapes. A
+slat-bed, a bureau, a washstand with a noseless pitcher, and a
+much-spotted Brussels carpet completed the furnishings, and out of all
+exuded ancient odors of boiled cabbage and soap-suds.
+
+"There's one thing, though, I won't stand for, and that's cigarettes.
+I've had the last girl in my house that smokes cigarettes I'm going to
+have. Look at that nice carpet! Look at it! All burned full of holes
+where that trollop throwed her matches."
+
+I hurried away, with a polite promise to consider the McGinniss
+accommodations.
+
+The abode of Mrs. Cunningham was but a few blocks away. Mrs. Cunningham
+did not live in a flat, but in the comparative gentility of "up-stairs
+rooms" over a gaudy undertaking establishment. She proved to be an Irish
+lady with a gin-laden breath. Her eyes were blue and bleared, and looked
+in kindly fashion through a pair of large-rimmed and much-mended
+spectacles, from which one of the glasses had totally disappeared. She
+was affable, and responded to my questions with almost maudlin
+tenderness, calling me "dearie" throughout the interview. Her little
+parlor was hung with chromo reproductions of great religious paintings,
+and the close atmosphere was redolent of the heavy perfume of lilies
+and stale tuberoses. Remarking the unusual prodigality of flowers, the
+good lady explained that the undertaker beneath was in the habit of
+showing his esteem by the daily tender of such funeral decorations as
+had served their purpose. Mrs. Cunningham's accommodations at four
+dollars per week were beyond my purse, however; but, as she was willing
+to talk all day, my exit was made with difficulty.
+
+The remainder of that day and a good part of the days that followed were
+spent in interviewing all manner of landladies, most of whom, like Mrs.
+McGinniss's bell, were disordered physically or mentally. Heartsick, I
+decided by Saturday to take blind chances with the janitress of a
+Fourteenth-street lodging-house. She had a cleft palate, and all I could
+understand of her mutilated talk was that the room would be one dollar a
+week with "light-housekeeping" privileges thrown in. I had either to pay
+Miss Jamison another five dollars that next morning or take chances
+here. I took the hazard, paid the necessary one dollar to the more or
+less inarticulate woman, and went back to Miss Jamison's to get my
+baggage and to eat the one dinner that was still due me--not forgetting
+to leave a little note for the still absent Minnie Plympton, giving her
+my new address.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+I TRY "LIGHT" HOUSEKEEPING IN A FOURTEENTH-STREET LODGING-HOUSE
+
+
+Bedtime found me thoroughly settled in my new quarters, and myself in
+quite an optimistic frame of mind as I drew close to the most fearfully
+and wonderfully mutilated little cook-stove that ever cheered the heart
+of a lonely Fourteenth-street "light housekeeper." In the red-hot glow
+of its presence, and with the inspiring example of courage and fortitude
+which it presented, how could I have felt otherwise than optimistic? It
+was such a tiny mite of a stove, and it seemed to have had such a world
+of misfortune and bad luck! There was something whimsically, almost
+pathetically, human about it. This, it so pleased my fancy to believe,
+was because of the sufferings it had borne. Its little body cracked and
+warped and rust-eaten, the isinglass lights in its door long since
+punched out by the ruthless poker, the door itself swung to on the
+broken hinge by a twisted nail--a brave, bright, merry little cripple
+of a stove, standing on short wooden legs. I made the interesting
+discovery that it was a stove of the feminine persuasion; "Little
+Lottie" was the name which I spelled out in the broken letters that it
+wore across its glowing heart. And straightway Little Lottie became more
+human than ever--poor Little Lottie, the one solitary bright and
+cheerful object within these four smoke-grimed walls which I had elected
+to make my home.
+
+Home! The tears started at the mere recollection of the word. The
+firelight that flickered through the broken door showed an ironical
+contrast between the home that now was and that which once had been, and
+to which I looked back with such loving thoughts that night. A narrow
+wooden bedstead, as battered and crippled as Little Lottie, but without
+the latter's air of sympathy and companionship; a tremulous kitchen
+table; a long box set on end and curtained off with a bit of faded
+calico, a single chair with a mended leg--these rude conveniences
+comprised my total list of housekeeping effects, not forgetting, of
+course, the dish-pan, the stubby broom, and the coal-scuttle, along with
+the scanty assortment of thick, chipped dishes and the pots and pans on
+the shelf behind the calico curtain. There was no bureau, only a waved
+bit of looking-glass over the sink in the corner. My wardrobe was strung
+along the row of nails behind the door, a modest array of petticoats and
+skirts and shirt-waists, with a winter coat and a felt sailor-hat.
+Beneath them, set at right angles to the corner, was the little
+old-fashioned swell-top trunk, which precaution prompted me to drag
+before the door. It had been my mother's trunk, and this was the first
+journey it had made since it carried her bridal finery to and from the
+Philadelphia Centennial. In the quiet, uneventful years that followed it
+had reposed in a big, roomy old garret, undisturbed save at the annual
+spring house-cleaning, or when we children played "The Mistletoe Bough"
+and hid in it the skeleton which had descended to us as a relic of our
+grandfather's student days.
+
+What a change for the little old trunk and what a change for me the last
+twelve months had brought about! After the door had been further
+barricaded by piling the chair on top of the trunk, and the coal-scuttle
+on top of the chair, I blew out the evil-smelling lamp and crept with
+fear and trembling into a most inhospitable-looking bed. It received my
+slight weight with a groan, and creaked dismally every time I stirred.
+Through the thin mattress I could feel the slats, that seemed hard
+bands of pain across my tired body.
+
+From where I was lying I could look straight into Little Lottie's heart,
+now a steady, glowing mass of coals. Little Lottie invited me to
+retrospection. How different it all was in reality from what I had
+imagined it would be! In the story-books it is always so alluring--this
+coming to a great city to seek one's fortune. A year ago I had been
+teaching in a little school-house among my Pennsylvania hills, and I
+recalled now, very vividly, how I used to love, on just such cold winter
+nights as this, when the wind whistled at every keyhole of the
+farm-house where I boarded during the school year to pull my
+rocking-chair into the chimney-corner and read magazine stories about
+girls who lived in hall bedrooms on little or nothing a week; and of
+what good times they had, or seemed to have, with never being quite
+certain where the next meal was to come from, or whether it was to come
+at all.
+
+
+I was wakened by the rattle of dishes, the clatter of pots and pans, and
+the rancid odor of frying bacon, bespeaking the fact that somebody's
+breakfast was under way in the next room to mine. I stepped across the
+bare, cold floor to the window, and, rolling up the sagging
+black-muslin blind, looked out upon the world. Bleak and unbeautiful was
+the prospect that presented itself through the interstices of the spiral
+fire-escape--a narrow vista strung with clothes-lines and buttressed all
+about with the rear walls of high, gaunt, tottering tenements, the dirty
+windows of which were filled with frowzy-headed women and children.
+Something interesting was going on below, for in a moment every window
+was thrown up, and a score of heads leaned far out. I followed suit.
+
+In the sloppy, slush-filled courtyard below two untidy women were
+engaged in coarse vituperation that shortly led to blows. The window
+next to mine was quickly raised, and I drew back to escape being
+included in the category of curious spectators to this disgraceful
+scene--but too late.
+
+"What's the row?" a voice asked with friendly familiarity. It was the
+girl who had been frying the bacon, and she still held a greasy knife in
+her hand. I answered that I did not know. She was very young, hardly
+more than sixteen. She had a coarse, bold, stupid face, topped by a
+heavy black pompadour that completely concealed any forehead she might
+be supposed to possess. She was decidedly an ill-looking girl; but the
+young fellow in his shirt-sleeves who now stuck his head out of the
+window alongside of hers was infinitely more so. He had a weak face,
+covered with pimples, and the bridge of his nose was broken; but,
+despite these manifest facial defects, and notwithstanding the squalor
+of his surroundings, a very high collar and a red necktie gave him the
+unmistakable air of the cheap dandy. Again I gave a civil evasion to the
+girl's trivial question, and as I did so her companion, looking over her
+frowzy pompadour, stared at me with insolent familiarity. I jerked my
+head in hurriedly, and, shutting the window, turned my attention to
+Little Lottie. It was not long before my tea-kettle was singing merrily.
+I was about to sit down to the first meal in my new abode, when an
+insinuating rat-tat sounded on the door. I opened it to find the
+ill-looking young fellow leaning languidly against the door-jamb, a
+cigarette between his teeth.
+
+"What do you wish?" I asked, in my most matter-of-fact manner.
+
+He puffed some smoke in my face, then took the cigarette from his mouth
+and looked at me, evidently at a loss for an answer.
+
+"The girl in there wants to know if you'll loan her one of your plates,"
+he replied at last.
+
+"I am sorry," I said, with freezing politeness--"I am very sorry, but I
+have only one plate, and I'll need that myself," and I closed the door.
+
+After breakfast I walked up to First Avenue to lay in my provisions for
+the day--a loaf of bread, a quart of potatoes, a quarter of a pound of
+butter, and two cents' worth of milk. Never in my life before had I
+bought anything on the Sabbath day, and never before had I seen a place
+of business open for trade on that day. My people had not been sternly
+religious people, and, theoretically, I didn't think I was doing
+anything wicked; yet I felt, as I gave my order to the groceryman, as
+though I were violating every sacred tradition of birth and breeding.
+After that I tried to do all necessary marketing the day before, and if
+I needed anything on Sunday I made myself go without it.
+
+Returning with my unholy provisions tucked under my arm and a
+broken-nosed blue pitcher deftly concealed under my protecting cape, I
+made my first daylight inventory of that block of Fourteenth Street
+where I lived. On each corner stood a gaudy saloon, surmounted by a
+Raines law hotel. It seemed to have been at one time the abode of
+fashion, for though both ends of the block were supported by business
+buildings, the entire middle presented a solid front of brownstone,
+broken at intervals by long flights of steps leading to handsome,
+though long-neglected black-walnut doors. The basements were given over
+to trade.
+
+On the stairs I was brought face to face again with my sinister-looking
+young man. I looked straight ahead, so as to avoid his eyes. But I found
+the way blocked, as he stretched his arms from banister to wall.
+
+"What's the matter with you?" he began coaxingly. "Say, I'll take you to
+the theater, if you want to go. What do you say to 'The Jolly Grass
+Widows' to-morrow night?"
+
+Thoroughly frightened, I responded to the unwarranted invitation by
+retreating two steps down the stairs, whereupon the young ruffian jumped
+down and grasped the arm in which I held my packages. I don't know what
+nerved me up to such a heroic defense, but in the twinkling of an eye he
+fell sprawling down the stairs, followed by the flying remnants of my
+landlady's milk-pitcher. Then I ran up the remaining two flights as fast
+as my feet would carry me, and landed in the midst of an altercation
+between the inarticulate landlady and my girl neighbor. In passing, I
+could make out enough of the wrangle to understand that the latter was
+being ordered out of the house.
+
+When quietness had been restored, there was a tap at my door. I
+demanded the name of my visitor in as brave a voice as I could command.
+"Mrs. Pringle," returned the broken voice of the landlady. I saw, when I
+opened the door, that she wanted to talk to me. I also saw, what I had
+not noticed in my hasty interview the night before, that she was
+superior to most of the women of her class. She had been grimy and
+unkempt the night before, after her long week's work of sweeping and
+cleaning and coal-carrying; but to-day, in her clean wrapper and smooth
+gray hair, there was a pathetic Sabbath-day air of cleanliness about her
+spare, bent figure. Somehow, I felt that she would not be so very angry
+when I explained about the pitcher, and I invited her in with genuine
+cordiality.
+
+She listened in silence to my story, her knotted hands folded upon her
+starched gingham apron.
+
+"That's all right!" she replied, a smile lighting up her tired face.
+"I'm just glad you broke the pitcher over that vile fellow's head."
+
+"You know him, then?" I suggested.
+
+She shook her head. "No, I don't know him, but I know the bad lot he
+belongs to. I've just warned this girl in here to leave as soon as she
+can pack her things. I gave her back her rent-money. She only come day
+afore yesterday, and I supposed she was an honest working-girl or I'd
+never have took her. She pretended to me she was a skirt-hand, and it
+turns out she's nothin' but a common trollop. And I hated to turn her
+out, too, even if she did talk back to me something awful. She can't be
+more 'n sixteen; but, somehow or t' other, when a girl like that goes to
+be bad, there ain't no use trying to reason 'em out of it. You come from
+the country, don't you?"
+
+There was a kindly curiosity mirrored in the dim, sunken eyes which
+surveyed me steadily, a lingering accent of repressed tenderness in her
+voice, and I did not deem it beneath my dignity to tell this decent,
+motherly soul my little story.
+
+She listened attentively. "I knowed you were a well-brought-up young
+woman the moment I laid eyes on you," she began, the maimed words
+falling gently from her lips, despite the high, cracked voice in which
+they were spoken. "And I knowed you was from the country, too; so I did.
+You don't mind, honey, do you, if I speak sort of plain with you, being
+as I'm an old woman and you just a slip of a girl? Do you, now?"
+
+I replied that she might speak just as plainly as she liked with me and
+I would take no offense, and then she smiled approvingly upon me and
+drew her little checked breakfast-shawl closer about her sunken bosom.
+
+"I like to hear you say that," she went on, "because so many girls won't
+listen to a word of advice--least of all when it comes from an old woman
+that they thinks don't know as much as they does. They don't relish
+being told how careful they ought to be about the people they get
+acquainted with. Now I'm talking to you just as if you was one of my
+own. You may think you are wise, and all that,--and you are a bright
+sort of girl, I'll give you credit for that, only this is such a wicked
+city. A young girl like you, with no folks of her own to go to when
+she's discouraged and blue, 'll find plenty and to spare that'll be
+willing to lead her off. This is a bad neighborhood you're in, and you
+got to be mighty careful about yourself. Forewarned is forearmed, as
+you've heard tell before; and I have saw so many young girls go wrong
+that I felt could have been saved if somebody had just up and talked
+straight at them in the beginning, like I'm talking here to you. I had a
+girl here in this house two years agone. A pretty girl she was, and she
+was from the country too. Somewheres up in Connecticut she come from.
+She was a nice, innocent girl too, so she was, when she come here to
+rent a room. This very room you've got was the one she had. Just as
+quiet and modest and respectful spoken to her elders as you are, she
+was. She worked down in St. Mark's Place. She was a cap-maker and got
+four dollars a week. She started out to live honest, for she'd been
+brought up decent. Her father, she told me when she come here, was a
+blacksmith in some of them little country towns up there. She thought
+she could make lots of money to come down here to work, and that she
+could have a fine time; and I guess she was terrible disappointed when
+she found just how things really was. She hankered for fine clothes and
+to go to theaters, and there wasn't any chanst for neither on four
+dollars a week. By and by, though, she did get to going out some with a
+young fellow that worked where she did. He was a nice, decent young
+fellow, and I'll warrant you she could have married him if she had acted
+wise and sensible; and he'd like as not have made her a good provider. I
+don't blame the men out and out, as some folks do; and I say that when a
+young fellow sees that a girl 'll let him act free with her, he just
+says to himself she'll let other fellows act free with her, and then he
+don't want to marry her, no difference how much he might have thought of
+her to begin with. That's what, I think, started this girl going wrong.
+At first he'd just bring her to the door when they'd be out to the
+theater, but by and by she got to taking him up to her room. Now it's
+none of my business to interfere with people's comings and goings in
+this house, being as I'm only the janitress. I have my orders from the
+boss--who's a real nice sort of man--to only rent rooms to respectable
+people, and to put anybody out where I knows there's bad conduct going
+on. He's strong on morals, the boss is. He used to be a saloon-keeper,
+and the Salvation Army converted him; and then he sold out and went into
+this business. He has this place, and then he has a boarding-house on
+Second Avenue. These Germans are awful kind men, when they are kind, and
+Mr. Schneider has did a lot of good. If any of his tenants get sick and
+can't pay their rent, or if they get out of work, he don't bounce them
+into the street, but he just tells them to stay on and pay him when they
+get caught up; and would you believe it that he never loses a cent,
+either!"
+
+Here the woman stopped for breath, which gave me an opportunity to turn
+the channel of her talk back to the girl from Connecticut.
+
+"Well, I didn't have no right to tell the girl that she mustn't take her
+gentleman friend to her room, because there ain't no law again it in
+any light-housekeeping rooms. The people who live here are all
+working-people and earn their livings; and they've got a right to do as
+they please so they're quiet and respectable. But I took it on myself to
+kind of let the girl understand that her beau would think more of her if
+she just dropped him at the front door. A man 'll always pick a spunky,
+independent girl that sort of keeps him at a stand-off every time,
+anyway. She looked sort of miffed when I said this, and then I said that
+she could set up with him any time she wanted in my sitting-room in the
+basement, what is real comfortable furnished and pretty-looking--and
+which you too is perfectly welcome to bring any gentleman company to any
+time you've a mind.
+
+"Well, she looked at me sort of scornful, and answered me real
+peart-like, and said she guessed she could take care of herself. She
+tossed her head in a pretty taking way she had, and walked down-stairs,
+as though I had turribly insulted her; so what could I do?"
+
+Again she paused, panting for breath in short, wheezy gasps.
+
+"And what became of her at last?" I asked.
+
+"What became of her!" she echoed. "What becomes of all of 'em?" and she
+jerked her head significantly in the vague direction of the street. "She
+left soon after that, though I never said another word to her, but just
+kept on bidding her the time of day, as if nothing had ever passed
+between us. I felt turrible about her leaving, too; and I tried to
+persuade her she was making a mistake by leaving a house that she knowed
+was decent and where she could manage to live within her means. Oh, you
+don't know how I felt for days and weeks after she went. I knew how good
+she was when she come to this house, and I kept thinking how my Annie
+might have been just as foolish and heedless if she'd been throwed
+amongst strangers and had the same temptations. I don't know where she
+went exactly. She didn't give me much satisfaction about it, and I never
+seen her again, till one morning this winter, when I went out to bring
+in my ash-cans, I run right into her. It was real early in the morning,
+just getting daylight. I always get up at five o'clock winter and
+summer, because I'm used to it; and then I've got to, so's to get the
+work done, for I can't work fast with my rheumatics. It was hardly light
+enough yet for me to recognize her right away, and she did look so
+forlorn and pitiful-like walking there so early in the morning in the
+snow. It had snowed in the night, and it was the first we'd had this
+season. She didn't see me at first. She was walking slow,--real slow and
+lingering-like,--like them poor things do. I was standing at the top of
+the stairs in the areaway, and her face was turned across the street, as
+if she was expecting somebody. I tried to speak to her, but sometimes
+something catches me when I'm strong moved and I can't sound a word for
+several moments. And that's the way I was struck that morning. I started
+to run after her; then I thought better of it, and sort of guessed she'd
+turn around at the corner and come back. So I went to the cans and made
+believe to be turrible interested in them, and when I looked up, sure
+enough she had started back again, and I had caught her eye.
+
+"Thinking of Annie, I bade her the time of day real friendly-like, just
+as though everything was all right, and I asked her to come in and have
+a bite of breakfast. I'd left the coffee on the stove, and had fried
+myself a nice mess of onions. She looked sort of half shamed and half
+grateful, and had started to come with me, when all of a sudden she
+stopped and said she guessed she couldn't that morning. Then she
+strolled off again. I picked up my ash-cans and started down-stairs, but
+I wasn't half-way down when I saw her hurrying along the other side of
+the street with a man I'd seen come round the corner by Skelly's saloon
+while we was talking together. And I never saw her again."
+
+An expression of pathos, infinitely sweet and tender, had crept into the
+woman's thin, worn face--an expression in strange, almost ludicrous,
+contrast to the high, cracked voice in which the talc had been
+delivered. I gazed at the bent old creature with something like
+reverence for the nobility which I now could read so plainly in every
+line of her face--the nobility which can attach itself only to decency
+of life and thought and action. In my brief interview with her in the
+twilight of the evening before I had heard only the ridiculous jargon of
+a woman without a palate, and I had seen only an old crone with a
+soot-smeared face. But now the maimed voice echoed in my ears like the
+sound of the little old melodeon with the broken strings--which had been
+my mother's.
+
+"I must be going now," she said, rising with an effort. "You'll come
+down and see me sometimes, won't you, honey? I like young people. They
+sort of cheer me up when I feel down. Come down this afternoon, if you
+haven't got any place to go. Come down and I'll lend you some books."
+
+I thanked her, and promised I would.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+WHEREIN FATE BRINGS ME GOOD FORTUNE IN ONE HAND AND DISASTER IN THE
+OTHER
+
+
+Monday morning--a cheerless, bleak Monday morning, with the rain falling
+upon the slush-filled streets. I ate a hurried breakfast of bread and
+butter and black coffee, locked my door, and started out with renewed
+vigor to look for a job. I had learned by this time to use a little
+discrimination in answering advertisements; and from now on I paid
+attention to such prospective employers only as stated the nature of
+their business and gave a street number.
+
+I had also learned another important thing, and that was that I could
+not afford to be too particular about the nature of my job, as I watched
+my small capital diminish day by day, despite my frugality. I would have
+been glad, now, to get work at anything that promised the chance of a
+meager livelihood. Anything to get a foothold. The chief obstacle seemed
+to be my inexperience. I could obtain plenty of work which in time
+promised to pay me five dollars a week, but in the two or three months'
+time necessary to acquire dexterity I should have starved to death, for
+I had not money to carry me over this critical period.
+
+Work was plenty enough. It nearly always is so. The question was not how
+to get a job, but how to live by such jobs as I could get. The low wages
+offered to green hands--two and a half to three dollars a week--might do
+for the girl who lived at home; but I had to pay room-rent and car-fare
+and to buy food. So, as long as my small capital could be made to hold
+out I continued my search for something that would pay at least five
+dollars a week to begin with.
+
+On Monday night I was no nearer to being a bread-winner than when I had
+started out for the first time from Miss Jamison's boarding-house. I
+climbed the bare stairs at nightfall, and as I fumbled at the keyhole I
+could hear the click of a typewriter in the room next to mine. My room
+was quite dark, but there was a patch of dim white on the floor that
+sent a thrill of gladness all over me. I lighted the lamp and tore open
+the precious envelop before taking off my gloves or hat. It was a note
+from Minnie Plympton, saying she had got employment as demonstrator for
+a cereal-food company, and was making a tour of the small New England
+cities. The letter was dated at Bangor, Maine, and she asked me to write
+her at Portland, where she expected to be all week; and which I did, at
+considerable length, after I had cooked and eaten my supper.
+
+Bread and butter and black coffee for breakfast, and potato-soup and
+bread and butter for supper, with plain bread and butter done up in a
+piece of paper and carried with me for luncheon--this was my daily menu
+for the weeks that followed, varied on two occasions by the purchase of
+a half-pint of New Orleans molasses.
+
+
+The advertisements for cigar and cigarette workers were very numerous;
+and as that sounded like humble work, I thought I might stand a better
+chance in that line than any other. Accordingly I applied to the foreman
+of a factory in Avenue A, who wanted "bunch-makers." He heard my
+petition in a drafty hallway through which a small army of boys and
+girls were pouring, each one stopping to insert a key in a
+time-register. They were just coming to work, for I was very early. The
+foreman, a young German, cut me off unceremoniously by asking to see my
+working-card; and when I looked at him blankly, for I hadn't a ghost of
+an idea what he meant, he strode away in disgust, leaving me to
+conjecture as to his meaning.
+
+Nothing daunted, however, for I meant to be very energetic and brave
+that morning, I went to the next factory. Here they wanted "labelers,"
+and as this sounded easy, I approached the foreman with something like
+confidence. He asked what experience I'd had, and I gave him a truthful
+reply.
+
+"Sorry, but we're not running any kindergarten here," he replied curtly
+and turned away.
+
+I was still determined that I'd join the rank of cigar-makers. Somehow,
+they impressed me as a very prosperous lot of people, and there was
+something pungent and wholesome in the smell of the big, bright
+workrooms.
+
+The third foreman I besought was an elderly German with a paternal
+manner. He listened to me kindly, said I looked quick, and offered to
+put me on as an apprentice, explaining with much pomposity that
+cigar-making was a very difficult trade, at which I must serve a three
+years' apprenticeship before I could become a member of the union and
+entitled to draw union wages. I left him feeling very humble, and
+likewise disillusioned of my cigar-making ambitions.
+
+"Girls wanted to learn binding and folding--paid while learning." The
+address took me to Brooklyn Bridge and down a strange, dark thoroughfare
+running toward the East River. Above was the great bridge, unreal,
+fairy-like in the morning mist. I was looking for Rose Street, which
+proved to be a zigzag alley that wriggled through one of the great
+bridge arches into a world of book-binderies. Rose Street was choked
+with moving carts loaded with yellow-back literature done up in bales.
+The superintendent proved to be a civil young man. He did not need me
+before Monday, but he told me to come back that day at half-past seven
+and to bring a bone paper-cutter with me. He paid only three dollars a
+week, and I accepted, but with the hope that as this was only Thursday,
+and not yet nine o'clock, I might find something better in the meantime.
+
+A Brooklyn merchant was in need of two "salesladies--experience not
+necessary." A trolley-car swirled me across the river, now glistering in
+the spring sunshine. We were hurtled down interminable vistas of small
+shops, always under the grim iron trestle of the elevated railroad. At
+the end of an hour I entered the "Majestic," a small store stocked with
+trash. After much dickering, Mr. Lindbloom and his wife decided I'd do
+at three and a half dollars per week, working from seven in the morning
+till nine in the evening, Saturdays till midnight. I departed with the
+vow that if I must work and starve, I should not do both in Lindbloom's.
+
+Five cents got me back to Cortlandt Street in Manhattan, where I called
+upon a candy-manufacturer who wanted bonbon-makers. The French foreman,
+in snowy cap and apron, received me in a great room dazzling with
+white-tile walls and floor, and filled with bright-eyed girls, also in
+caps and aprons, and working before marble tables. The Frenchman was
+polite and apologetic, but they never hired any but experienced workers.
+
+It was half-past three, and I had two more names on my list. Rose-making
+sounded attractive, and I walked all the way up to Bond Street. Shabby
+and prosaic, this street, strangely enough, has been selected as the
+forcing-ground or nursery of artificial flowers. Its signs on both
+sides, even unto the top floor, proclaim some specialization of
+fashionable millinery--flowers, feathers, aigrets, wire hat-frames. On
+the third floor, rear, of a once fashionable mansion, now fallen into
+decay, I stumbled into a room, radiantly scarlet with roses. The
+jangling bell attached to the door aroused no curiosity whatever in the
+white-faced girls bending over these gay garlands. It was a signal,
+though, for a thick-set beetle-browed young fellow to bounce in from the
+next room and curtly demand my business.
+
+"We only pay a dollar and a half to learners," he said, smiling
+unpleasantly over large yellow teeth. I fled in dismay. Down Broadway,
+along Bleecker, and up squalid Thompson Street I hurried to a paper-box
+factory.
+
+The office of E. Springer & Company was in pleasant contrast to the
+flower sweat-shop, for all its bright colors. So, too, was there a
+grateful comparison between the Jew of the ugly smile and the portly
+young man who sat behind a glass partition and acknowledged my entrance
+by glancing up from his ledger. The remark he made was evidently witty
+and not intended for my ears, for it made the assistant bookkeeper--a
+woman--and the two women typewriters laugh and crane their necks in my
+direction. The bookkeeper climbed down from his high stool and opened
+the glass door. He was as kind now as he was formerly merry. Possibly he
+had seen my chin quiver the least bit, and knew I was almost ready to
+cry. He did not ask many questions; but presently he sent one typewriter
+flying up-stairs for the superintendent, and the other was sent to ask
+of the forewoman if all the jobs were filled. The superintendent proved
+to be a woman, shrewd, keen-faced, and bespectacled. The forewoman sent
+down word that No. 105 had not rung up that morning, and that I could
+have her key. The pay was three dollars a week to learners, but Miss
+Price, the superintendent, thought I could learn in a week's time, which
+opinion the portly gentleman heartily indorsed, and so I allowed him to
+enroll my name. He gave me a key, showed me how to "ring up" in the
+register at the foot of the stairs, and told me that henceforth I should
+be known as "105."
+
+I thanked him in as steady a voice as I could command, and reached the
+street door on the stroke of six, just in time to hear my shopmates of
+the morrow laughing and scrambling down-stairs in their mad effort to
+get away from that which I had been trying to obtain for so many weeks.
+
+The street I stepped into had been transformed. Behind my blurred
+vision, as I hurried along, I saw no squalor, no wretchedness now.
+Through tears of thankfulness the houses, the streets, and the hurrying
+people were all glorified, all transfigured. Everything was right--the
+whole world and everybody in it.
+
+Thus I sped homeward on that eventful evening, eager to tell my good
+news to Mrs. Pringle, who, I knew, would be glad to hear it. As I drew
+near the block where I lived, I became half conscious of something
+strange and unusual in the atmosphere; I felt the strange sensation of
+being lost, of being in the wrong place. Men and women stood about in
+silent knots, and through the deep twilight I felt rather than heard the
+deep throbbing of fire-engines. Pressing through the little knots of men
+and women, I stood before the red mass of embers and watched the firemen
+pour their quenching streams upon the ashes of my lodging-house.
+
+Dazed, stupefied, I asked questions of the bystanders. But nobody knew
+anything definite. One man said he guessed a good many lives had been
+lost; the woman next to him said she'd heard the number was five.
+
+The houses on both sides were still standing, the windows smashed in,
+and the tenants fled. There seemed to be not even a neighbor who might
+know of the fate of my lodging-house acquaintance or of my good friend
+Mrs. Pringle. I spoke to a policeman. He listened gently, and then
+conducted me to a house in Fifteenth Street, where they had offered
+shelter for the night to any refugees who might desire it.
+
+The basement of this house had been turned into a dormitory, one
+section for the men and the other for the women, who were in greater
+number and came straggling in one by one. A man-servant in livery passed
+hot coffee and sandwiches, which we swallowed mechanically, regarding
+one another and our surroundings with stupid bewilderment. I had never
+met any of these people before, though they had all been my
+fellow-lodgers.
+
+The girl sitting on the cot next to mine passed her cup up for more
+coffee, and as she did so turned a quizzical gaze upon me. She was
+stupid and ugly. Her quizzical look deepened into curiosity, and by and
+by she asked:
+
+"Youse didn't live there too, did youse?"
+
+Our common misfortune inspired me to a cordial reply, and we fell into a
+discussion of the catastrophe. Her English was so sadly perverted and
+her voice so guttural that I could make out her meaning only with the
+greatest exercise of the imagination. But it was to the effect that the
+fire had started in a room on the top floor, whither poor old Mrs.
+Pringle had gone about three o'clock in the afternoon with a bucket of
+coal for the fire. Just what happened nobody knew. Every one on the top
+floor at the time had perished, including Mrs. Pringle.
+
+"Didn't youse get nothin' out, neither?" asked my companion. And then
+it dawned upon me for the first time that I had nothing in all the world
+now but the clothes on my back and the promise of work on the morrow.
+
+"Yes, I have lost everything," I answered.
+
+"Youse got anything in the bank?" she pursued.
+
+The question seemed to me ironical and not worthy of notice.
+
+"I have. I've got 'most five hundred dollars saved up," she went on.
+
+"Five hundred dollars!"
+
+The girl nodded. "Huh, that's what! I could live tony if I wanted, but I
+like to save my money. I makes good money, too,--twelve dollars a
+week,--and I don't spend it, neither."
+
+"What do you do?" I asked, regarding the large, rough hands with
+something like admiration for their earning abilities.
+
+"I'm a lady-buffer," she answered, with a touch of pride.
+
+"A lady-buffer! What's that?" I cried, looking at the slovenly,
+dirt-streaked wrapper and the shabby golf-cape that had slipped from her
+shoulders to the cot. She regarded me with pity for my ignorance, and
+then delivered herself of an axiom.
+
+"A lady-buffer is a lady what buffs." And, to render the definition
+still more explicit, she rolled up the sleeve of her wrapper, showed me
+mighty biceps, and then with her arm performed several rapid revolutions
+in midair.
+
+"What do you buff?" I next ventured.
+
+"Brass!"
+
+This laconic reply squelched me completely, and I subsided without
+further conversation.
+
+Despite my weariness, there was little sleep for me that night. Affairs
+had come to a crisis; my condition was about as bad as it could possibly
+be. Whatever was going to become of me? Why, in the name of all common
+sense, had I ever come to New York? Why was I not content to remain a
+country school-ma'am, in a place where a country school-ma'am was looked
+up to as something of a personage? That night, if I had had enough money
+to buy a ticket back to the town I had come from, my fate would have
+been settled definitely then and there.
+
+Not the least distressing part of my condition was the fact that there
+was really no help for me save what I should be able to give myself. To
+be sure, I had certain distant relatives and friends who had warned me
+against my flight to the city, and to whom I might have written begging
+for money sufficient to carry me back to my native place, and the money,
+with many "I-told-you-so's," would have been forthcoming. To return
+discredited was more than my pride could bear. I had to earn my
+livelihood anyway, and so, on this night of grim adversity, owing my
+very bed and supper to charity, I set my teeth, and closed my tired lids
+over the tears I could not hide, and swore I'd fight it out alone, so
+long as I had strength to stand and heart to hope; and then there was
+the prospect of a job at Springer's on the morrow, though the wage would
+hardly keep body and soul together.
+
+
+The next morning, while her servants were giving us our breakfast, a
+stately middle-aged woman came down to the basement and passed among us,
+making inquiries regarding our various conditions, and offering words of
+well-meant, if patronizing, advice and suggestion wherever she thought
+them needed, but which somehow did not seem to be relished as her more
+material kindness had been. When it came my turn to be interviewed I
+answered her many questions frankly and promptly, and, encouraged by the
+evident interest which she displayed in my case, I was prompted to ask
+her if she might know of any place where I could get work. She looked
+at me a moment out of fine, clear eyes.
+
+"You would not go into service, I suppose?" she asked slowly.
+
+I had never thought of such an alternative before, but I met it without
+a moment's hesitation. "No, I would not care to go into service," I
+replied, and as I did so the lady's face showed mingled disappointment
+and disgust.
+
+"That is too bad," she answered, "for in that case I'm afraid I can do
+nothing for you." And with that she went out of the room, leaving me, I
+must confess, not sorry for having thus bluntly declared against wearing
+the definite badge of servitude.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+IN WHICH I AM "LEARNED" BY PHOEBE IN THE ART OF BOX-MAKING
+
+
+The "lady-buffer" and I were the last to leave the house. We went out
+together and parted company at Third Avenue, she going south to her
+work, and I continuing along the street westward. The catastrophe of the
+preceding day seemed to have entirely evaporated from her memory; she
+seemed also to have forgotten the incident of our meeting and
+conversation of the night before, for she made no comment, nor even gave
+me a parting greeting.
+
+I was inclined to reproach such heartlessness as I hurried along, when
+suddenly it was borne in upon my consciousness that it was I, not she,
+who was open to that charge. Here I was, speeding along to my work with
+hope in my heart, sometimes almost forgetting that the woman who had
+been so kind to me was probably lying in the morgue, awaiting burial in
+the Potter's Field, unless saved from that ignoble end by some friend.
+And yet I was powerless. I could not even spare time to go to the morgue
+or to make inquiries. I knew not a soul who could have helped me, and I
+had only one dollar and a half in all the world, no place to sleep that
+night, no change of garments, nothing except the promise of work that
+morning at Springer's. I stopped at the corner, strongly tempted by my
+innate sense of decency to the memory of the dead. But only for a
+moment: the law of life--self-preservation--again asserted itself, and
+for the time being I put the past behind me and hurried on toward
+Thompson Street.
+
+It lacked but a few minutes of eight o'clock when, at last, I turned
+into the squalid street at the end of which stands Springer's. In the
+sunshine of the mild March morning the façade of the tall buff building
+looked for all the world like a gaunt, ugly, unkempt hag, frowning
+between bleared old eyes that seemed to coax--nay, rather to coerce me
+into entering her awful house.
+
+The instant impression was one of repulsion, and the impulse was to run
+away. But there was fascination, too, in the hag-like visage of those
+grim brick walls, checkered with innumerable dirty windows and trussed
+up, like a paralytic old crone, with rusty fire-escapes. It was the
+fascination of the mysterious and of the evil; and, repulsive and
+forbidding as was its general aspect, nothing could now have induced me
+to turn back. Instinct told me that I was about to enter into no
+commonplace experience. And so, unresisting, I was borne along in the
+swift current of humanity that was swept down the street, like the water
+in a mill-race, to turn the wheels of workshop and factory. Before
+Springer's a great arm of this human mill-stream eddied inward, to be
+lost in another moment in the vortex of the wide black doors, whence
+issued muffled sounds of the pandemonium within. At the last moment I
+hesitated, obsessed once more with the indefinable horror of it all.
+Again there was the strong impulse to run away--far, far away from
+Springer's and from Thompson Street, when suddenly the old monody began
+to ring in my ears, "WORK OR STARVE, WORK OR STARVE!" Another moment,
+and I too had passed within the wide black doors.
+
+The entrance passage was lighted by a sickly gas-jet, and in its flicker
+a horde of loud-mouthed girls were making frantic efforts to insert
+their keys in the time-register. I was jostled and tumbled over
+unceremoniously. I was pushed and punched unmercifully by the crowding
+elbows, until I found myself squeezed tight against the wall. From the
+scrambling and confusion it was evident everybody was late, and tones
+and language attested to racked nerves and querulous tempers. Suddenly
+there was a scuffle and the sharp scraping of feet on the floor.
+
+"Get out, yez dirty Irish!" rang out in the stifling air.
+
+"I wuz here fust!" snarled another voice.
+
+"Call me dirty Irish ag'in and I'll dirty Irish you."
+
+The black-haired girl had accepted the challenge, and the maligned
+daughter of Erin, cheeks aflame and eyes blazing, rushed at her
+detractor with clenched fist.
+
+"Go for her, Rosie! She's nothin' but a dirty black Ginney, nohow!"
+
+"Pitch into her, Celie! Punch her!" yelled a chorus from the stairs who
+came swooping down from above, attracted by the scrimmage, and just in
+time to see the combatants rush at each other in a hand-to-hand
+struggle, punctuated with loud oaths.
+
+The noise suddenly subsided at the screeching of a raucous nasal voice.
+
+"Well, young ladies! What does this mean?" demanded the superintendent,
+and Rosie and Celie both began to talk at once.
+
+"Never mind about the rest of it," snapped Miss Price, cutting the tale
+short. "I'll dock you both half a day's pay: and the next time it
+happens you'll both be fired on the spot."
+
+Then Miss Price turned to me, while the now silent wranglers meekly
+turned their keys in the register and marched up-stairs, whither their
+respective factions had since disappeared.
+
+"I do hope to goodness you ain't high-tempered like some is," she
+remarked, with an effort toward affability, as we stepped before the
+time-register, where I inserted my key for the first time. "All I got to
+say is, don't get into no fights with the girls. When they say things to
+you, don't talk back. It's them that just takes things as they come, and
+lets bygones be bygones, that get the good checks at the end of the
+week. Some of them fight more 'n they work, but I guess you won't be
+that kind," she concluded, with an unctuous smile, displaying two rows
+of false teeth. Then, with a quick, nervous, jerky gait, she hopped up
+the flight of rough plank stairs, threw open a door, and ushered me into
+the bedlam noises of the "loft," where, amid the roar of machinery and
+the hum of innumerable voices, I was to meet my prospective forewoman.
+
+"Miss Kinzer! Here's a lady wants to learn," shrilled the high nasal
+voice. "Miss Kinzer! Where's Miss Kinzer? Oh, here you are!" as a young
+woman emerged from behind a pile of pasteboard boxes. "I've a learner
+for you, Miss Kinzer. She's a green girl, but she looks likely, and I
+want you to give her a good chance. Better put her on table-work to
+begin with." And with that injunction the little old maid hopped away,
+leaving me to the scrutiny and cross-questioning of a rather pretty
+woman of twenty-eight or thirty.
+
+"Ever worked in a factory before?" she began, with lofty indifference,
+as if it didn't matter whether I had or had not.
+
+"No."
+
+"Where did you work?"
+
+"I never worked any place before."
+
+"Oh-h!" There was a world of meaning, as I afterward discovered, in Miss
+Kinzer's long-drawn-out "Oh-h!" In this instance she looked up quickly,
+with an obvious display of interest, as if she had just unearthed a
+remarkable specimen in one who had never worked at anything before.
+
+"You're not used to work, then?" she remarked insinuatingly,
+straightening up from the rude desk where she sat like the judge of a
+police-court. She was now all attention.
+
+"Well, not exactly that," I replied, nettled by her manner and, above
+all, by her way of putting things. "I have worked before, but never at
+factory-work."
+
+"Then why didn't you say so?"
+
+She now opened her book and inscribed my name therein.
+
+"Where do you live?"
+
+"Over in East Fourteenth Street," I replied mechanically, forgetting for
+the moment the catastrophe that had rendered me more homeless than ever.
+
+"Home?"
+
+"No, I room." Then, reading only too quickly an unpleasant
+interpretation in the uplifted eyebrows, a disagreeable curiosity
+mirrored in the brown eyes beneath, I added hastily, "I have no home. My
+folks are all dead."
+
+What impression this bit of information made I was unable to determine
+as I followed her slender, slightly bowed figure across the busy,
+roaring workroom.
+
+"Be careful you don't get hurt," she cried, as we threaded a narrow
+passage in and out among the stamping, throbbing machinery, where, by
+the light that filtered through the grimy windows, I got vague, confused
+glimpses of girl-faces shining like stars out of this dark, fearful
+chaos of revolving belts and wheels, and above the bedlam noises came
+girlish laughter and song.
+
+"Good morning, Carrie!" one quick-witted toiler sang out as she spied
+the new girl in tow of the forewoman, and suddenly the whole room had
+taken up the burden of the song.
+
+"Don't mind them," my conductor remarked. "They don't mean nothing by
+it--watch out there for your head!"
+
+Safe through the outlying ramparts of machinery, we entered the domain
+of the table-workers, and I was turned over to Phoebe, a tall girl in
+tortoise ear-rings and curl-papers. Phoebe was assigned to "learn" me in
+the trade of "finishing." Somewhat to my surprise, she assumed the task
+joyfully, and helped me off with my coat and hat. From the loud-mouthed
+tirades as to "Annie Kinzer's nerve," it became evident that the
+assignment of the job of "learner" is one to cause heartburning
+jealousies, and that Phoebe, either because of some special adaptability
+or through favoritism, got the lion's share of novices.
+
+"That's right, Phoebe; hog every new girl that comes along!" amiably
+bawled a bright-faced, tidy young woman who answered to the name of Mrs.
+Smith. Mrs. Smith worked briskly as she talked, and the burden of her
+conversation appeared to be the heaping of this sort of good-natured
+invective upon the head of her chum--or, as she termed it, her
+"lady-friend," Phoebe. The amiability with which Mrs. Smith dealt out
+her epithets was only equaled by the perfect good nature of her victim,
+who replied to each and all of them with a musically intoned, "Hot air!"
+
+"Hot A--i--r!" The clear tones of Phoebe's soprano set the echoes
+ringing all over the great workroom. In and out among the aisles and
+labyrinthine passages that wind through towering piles of boxes, from
+the thundering machinery far over on the other side of the "loft" to the
+dusky recess of the uttermost table, the musical cry reverberated.
+
+"Hot a--i--r!" Every few minutes, all through the long, weary day,
+Phoebe found occasion for sounding that magic call.
+
+"The rest of the ladies get up their backs something awful," Phoebe
+explained as she dragged a big green pasteboard box from beneath the
+work-table. "They say she gives me more 'n my share of learners because
+I'm easy to get on with, I guess, and don't play no tricks on them....
+You have a right to put your things in here along with my lunch. Them
+girls is like to do 'most anything to a new girl's duds if you wuz to
+hang them in the coat-room. Them Ginneys 'll do 'most anything. Wuz you
+down-stairs when Celie Polatta got into the fight with Rosie?"
+
+"I just missed it," she sighed in reply to my affirmative. "I was born
+unlucky."
+
+"Hello, Phoebe! So you've hogged another!" a new voice called across the
+table, and I put a question.
+
+"Why do they all want to teach the new girl? I should think they'd be
+glad to be rid of the trouble."
+
+"You mean _learn_ her? Why, because the girl that learns the green hand
+gets all her work checked on to her own card while she's learning how.
+Never worked in a box-factory before?" I shook my head.
+
+"I guessed as much. Well, box-making's a good trade. Have you an apron?"
+
+As I had not, I was then ordered to "turn my skirt," in order that I
+might receive the inevitable coat of glue and paste on its inner rather
+than on its outer surface. I gently demurred against this very slovenly
+expedient.
+
+"All right; call it hot air if you want to. I s'pose you know it all,"
+tossing her curl-papers with scorn. "You know better 'n me, of course.
+Most learners do think they knows it all. Now looky here, I've been here
+six years, and I've learned lots of green girls, and I never had one as
+didn't think she hadn't ought to turn her skirt. The ladies I'm used to
+working with likes to walk home looking decent and respectable, no
+difference what they're like other times."
+
+With the respectability of my ladyhood thus impeached, and lest I
+infringe upon the cast-iron code of box-factory etiquette, there was
+nothing to do but yield. I unhooked my skirt, dropped it to the floor,
+and stepped out of it in a trice, anxious to do anything to win back the
+good will of Phoebe. Instantly she brightened, and good humor once more
+flashed over her grimy features.
+
+"H-m! that's the stuff! There's one thing you hadn't ought to forget,
+and mind, I'm speaking as one lady-friend to another when I tell you
+these things--and that is, that you have a right to do as the other
+girls in the factory or you'll never get 'long with them. If you don't
+they'll get down on you, sure's pussy's a cat; and then they'll make it
+hot for you with complaining to the forelady. And then she'll get down
+on you after while too, and won't give you no good orders to work on;
+and--well, it's just this way: a girl mustn't be odd."
+
+Continuing her philosophy of success, Phoebe proceeded to initiate me
+into the first process of my job, which consisted in pasting slippery,
+sticky strips of muslin over the corners of the rough brown boxes that
+were piled high about us in frail, tottering towers reaching to the
+ceiling, which was trellised over with a network of electric wires and
+steam-pipes. Two hundred and fifty of these boxes remained to be
+finished on the particular order upon which Phoebe was working. Each
+must be given eight muslin strips, four on the box and four on its
+cover; two tapes, inserted with a hair-pin through awl-holes; two tissue
+"flies," to tuck over the bonnet soon to nestle underneath; four pieces
+of gay paper lace to please madame's eye when the lid is lifted; and
+three labels, one on the bottom, one on the top, and one bearing the
+name of a Fifth Avenue modiste on an escutcheon of gold and purple.
+
+The job, as it progressed, entailed ceaseless shoving and shifting and
+lifting. In order that we might not be walled in completely by our
+cumbersome materials, every few minutes we bore tottering piles across
+the floor to the "strippers."
+
+These latter, who were small girls, covered the sides with glazed paper
+on machines; and as fast as each box was thus covered it was tossed to
+the "turner-in," a still smaller girl, who turned in the overlapping
+edge of the strip, after which the box was ready to come back to the
+table for the next process at our hands.
+
+By ten o'clock, with Mrs. Smith's gay violet-boxes and our own
+bonnet-boxes, we had built a snug bower all round our particular table.
+Through its pasteboard walls the din and the songs came but faintly. My
+mates' tongues flew as fast as their fingers. The talk was chiefly
+devoted to clothes, Phoebe's social activities, and the evident
+prosperity of Mrs. Smith's husband's folks, among whom it appeared she
+had only recently appeared as "Jeff's" bride. Having exhausted the
+Smiths, she again gave Phoebe the floor by asking:
+
+"Are you going to-night?"
+
+"Well, I should say! Don't I look it?"
+
+To determine by Phoebe's appearance where she might be going were an
+impossibility to the uninitiated, for her dress was an odd combination
+of the extremes of wretchedness and luxury. A woefully torn and
+much-soiled shirt-waist; a gorgeous gold watch worn on her breast like a
+medal; a black taffeta skirt, which, under the glue-smeared apron,
+emitted an unmistakable frou-frou; three Nethersole bracelets on her
+wrist; and her feet incased in colossal shoes, broken and stringless.
+The latter she explained to Mrs. Smith.
+
+"I just swiped a pair of paw's and brought them along this morning, or
+I'd be dished for getting into them high heels to-night. My corns and
+bunions 'most killed me yesterday--they always do break out bad about
+Easter. My pleasure club," she explained, turning to me--"my pleasure
+club, 'The Moonlight Maids,' give a ball to-night." Which fact likewise
+explained the curl-papers as well as the slattern shirt-waist, donned to
+save the evening bodice worn to the factory that morning and now tucked
+away in a big box under the table.
+
+A whole side of our pretty violet-sprinkled bower caved in as a little
+"turner-in" lurched against it in passing with a top-heavy column of
+boxes. Through the opening daylight is visible once more, and from the
+region of the machines is heard a chorus of voices singing "The Fatal
+Wedding."
+
+"Hot a--i--r!" Phoebe intones derisively. "It's a wonder Angelina
+wouldn't get a new song. Them strippers sing that 'Fatal Wedding' week
+in and week out."
+
+We worked steadily, and as the hours dragged on I began to grow dead
+tired. The awful noise and confusion, the terrific heat, the foul smell
+of the glue, and the agony of breaking ankles and blistered hands seemed
+almost unendurable.
+
+At last the hour-hand stood at twelve, and suddenly, out of the
+turmoil, a strange quiet fell over the great mill. The vibrations that
+had shaken the whole structure to its very foundations now gradually
+subsided; the wheels stayed their endless revolutions; the flying belts
+now hung from the ceiling like long black ribbons. Out of the stillness
+girl-voices and girl-laughter echoed weirdly, like a horn blown in a
+dream, while sweeter and clearer than ever rang Phoebe's soprano "Hot
+air!"
+
+The girls lunched in groups of ten and twelve. Each clique had its
+leader. By an unwritten law I was included among those who rallied
+around Phoebe, most of whom she had "learned" at some time or other, as
+she was now "learning" me. The luncheons were divested of their
+newspaper wrappings and spread over the ends of tables, on discarded
+box-lids held across the knees--in fact, any place convenience or
+sociability dictated. Then followed a friendly exchange of pickles and
+cake. A dark, swarthy girl, whom they called "Goldy" Courtleigh, was
+generous in the distribution of the lukewarm contents of a broken-nosed
+tea-pot, which was constantly replenished by application to the
+hot-water faucet.
+
+Although we had a half-hour, luncheon was swallowed quickly by most of
+the girls, eager to steal away to a sequestered bower among the boxes,
+there to lose themselves in paper-backed romance. A few of less literary
+taste were content to nibble ice-cream sandwiches and gossip. Dress, the
+inevitable masquerade ball, murders and fires, were favorite topics of
+discussion,--the last always with lowered voices and deep-drawn
+breathing. For fire is the box-maker's terror, the grim specter that
+always haunts her, and with good reason does she always start at the
+word.
+
+"I'm always afraid," declared Phoebe, "and I always run to the window
+and get ready to jump the minute I hear the alarm."
+
+"I don't," mused Angelina; "I haven't sense enough to jump: I faint dead
+away. There'd be no chance for me if a fire ever broke out here."
+
+Once or twice there was mention of beaux and "steady fellows," but the
+flesh-and-blood man of every-day life did not receive as much attention
+in this lunch chat as did the heroes of the story-books.
+
+While it was evident, of course, from scattered comments that box-makers
+are constantly marrying, it was likewise apparent that they have not
+sufficient imagination to invest their hard-working, sweat-grimed
+sweethearts with any halo of romance.
+
+Promptly at half-past twelve the awakening machinery called us back to
+the workaday world. Story-books were tucked away, and their entranced
+readers dragged themselves back to the machines and steaming paste-pots,
+to dream and to talk as they worked, hot of their own fellows of last
+night's masquerade, but of bankers and mill-owners who in fiction have
+wooed and won and honorably wedded just such poor toilers as they
+themselves.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+IN WHICH PHOEBE AND MRS. SMITH HOLD FORTH UPON MUSIC AND LITERATURE
+
+
+"Don't you never read no story-books?" Mrs. Smith asked, stirring the
+paste-pot preparatory to the afternoon's work. She looked at me
+curiously out of her shrewd, snapping dark eyes as she awaited my
+answer. I was conscious that Mrs. Smith didn't like me for some reason
+or other, and I was anxious to propitiate her. I was pretty certain she
+thought me a boresome prig, and I determined I'd prove I wasn't. My
+confession of an omnivorous appetite for all sorts of story-books had
+the desired effect; and when I confessed further, that I liked best of
+all a real, tender, sentimental love-story, she asked amiably:
+
+"How do you like 'Little Rosebud's Lovers'?"
+
+"I've never read that," I replied. "Is it good?"
+
+"It's fine," interposed Phoebe; "but I like 'Woven on Fate's Loom'
+better--don't you?" The last addressed to Mrs. Smith.
+
+"No, I can't say as that's my impinion," returned our vis-à-vis, with a
+judicious tipping of the head to one side as she soused her dripping
+paste-brush over the strips. "Not but what 'Woven on Fate's Loom' is a
+good story in its way, either, for them that likes that sort of story.
+But I think 'Little Rosebud's Lovers' is more int'resting, besides being
+better wrote."
+
+"And that's just what I don't like about it," retorted Phoebe, her
+fingers traveling like lightning up and down the corners of the boxes.
+"You like this hot-air talk, and I don't; and the way them fellows and
+girls shoot hot-air at each other in that there 'Little Rosebud's
+Lovers' is enough to beat the street-cars!"
+
+"What is it about?" I asked with respectful interest, addressing the
+question to Mrs. Smith, who gave promise of being a more serious
+reviewer than the flippant Phoebe. Mrs. Smith took a bite of gingerbread
+and began:
+
+"It's about a fair, beautiful young girl by the name of Rosebud Arden.
+Her pa was a judge, and they lived in a grand mansion in South Car'lina.
+Little Rosebud--that's what everybody called her--had a stepsister Maud.
+They was both beauties, only Maud didn't have a lovely disposition like
+Little Rosebud. A Harvard gradjate by the name of Percy Fielding got
+stuck on Little Rosebud for the wealth she was to get from her pa, and
+she was terrible stuck on him. She was stuck on him for fair, though not
+knowing he was a villain of the deepest dye. That's what the book called
+him. He talked her into marrying him clandestinely. Maud and her mother
+put up a job to get rid of Little Rosebud, so Maud could get all the
+money. So they told lies to her pa, who loved her something awful; and
+one night, when she came in after walking in the grand garden with her
+husband, who nobody knew she was married to, she found herself locked
+out. Then she went to the hotel where he was staying, and told him what
+had happened; but he turned her down flat when he heard it, for he
+didn't want nothing to do with her when she wasn't to get her pa's
+money; and then--"
+
+She stopped her cornering to inspect my work, which had not flagged an
+instant. Mrs. Smith took another bite of gingerbread, and continued with
+increasing animation:
+
+"And then Little Rosebud turned away into the night with a low cry, just
+as if a dagger had been punched into her heart and turned around slow.
+She was only sixteen years old, and she had been brought up in luxury
+and idolized by her father; and all of a sudden she found herself
+homeless, with nowheres to sleep find no money to get a room at the
+hotel, and scorned by the man that had sworn to protect her. Her pa had
+cursed her, too, something awful, so that he burst a blood-vessel a
+little while afterwards and died before morning. Only Little Rosebud
+never found this out, for she took the midnight express and came up here
+to New York, where her aunt lived, only she didn't know the
+street-number."
+
+"Where did she get the money to come to New York with?" interrupted the
+practical Phoebe. "That's something I don't understand. If she didn't
+have no money to hire a room at a hotel down in South Carolina for
+overnight, I'd like to know where she got money for a railroad ticket."
+
+"Well, that's just all you know about them swells," retorted Mrs. Smith.
+"I suppose a rich man's daughter like that can travel around all over
+the country on a pass. And saying she didn't have a pass, it's only a
+story and not true anyway.
+
+"She met a fellow on the train that night who was a villain for fair!"
+she went on. "His name was Mr. Paul Howard, and he was a corker. Little
+Rosebud, who was just as innocent as they make 'em, fell right into his
+clutches. He was a terrible man; he wouldn't stop at nothing, but he
+was a very elegant-looking gentleman that you'd take anywheres for a
+banker or 'Piscopalian preacher. He tipped his hat to Little Rosebud,
+and then she up and asked if he knew where her aunt, Mrs. Waldron,
+lived. This was nuts for him, and he said yes, that Mrs. Waldron was a
+particular lady-friend of his. When they got to New York he offered to
+take Little Rosebud to her aunt's house. And as Little Rosebud hadn't no
+money, she said yes, and the villain called a cab and they started for
+Brooklyn, him laughing to himself all the time, thinking how easily she
+was going to tumble into the trap he was getting fixed for her."
+
+"Hot air!" murmured Phoebe.
+
+"But while they were rattling over the Brooklyn Bridge, another man was
+following them in another cab--a Wall-street broker with barrels of
+cash. He was Raymond Leslie, and a real good man. He'd seen Rosebud get
+into the cab with Paul Howard, who he knew for a villain for fair. They
+had a terrible rumpus, but Raymond Leslie rescued her and took her to
+her aunt's house. It turned out that he was the gentleman-friend of
+Little Rosebud's cousin Ida, the very place they were going to. But,
+riding along in the cab, he fell in love with Little Rosebud, and then
+he was in a terrible pickle because he was promised to Ida. Little
+Rosebud's relations lived real grand, and her aunt was real nice to her
+until she saw she had hooked on to Ida's gentleman-friend; then they put
+her to work in the kitchen and treated her terrible. Oh, I tell you she
+had a time of it, for fair. Her aunt was awful proud and wicked, and
+after while, when she found that Raymond Leslie was going to marry
+Little Rosebud even if they did make a servant of her, she hired Paul
+Howard to drug her and carry her off to an insane-asylum that he ran up
+in Westchester County. It was in a lonesome place, and was full of girls
+that he had loved only to grow tired of and cast off, and this was the
+easiest way to get rid of them and keep them from spoiling his sport.
+Once a girl was in love with Paul Howard, she loved him till death. He
+just fascinated women like a snake does a bird, and he was hot stuff as
+long as he lasted, but the minute he got tired of you he was a demon of
+cruelty.
+
+"He did everything he could, when he got Little Rosebud here, to get her
+under his power. He tried his dirty best to poison her food, but Little
+Rosebud was foxy and wouldn't touch a bite of anything, but just sat in
+her cell and watched the broiled chicken and fried oysters, and all the
+other good things they sent to tempt her, turn to a dark-purplish hue.
+One night she escaped disguised in the turnkey's daughter's dress. Her
+name was Dora Gray, and Paul Howard had blasted her life too, but she
+worshiped him something awful, all the same-ee. Dora Gray gave Little
+Rosebud a lovely dark-red rose that was soaked with deadly poison, so
+that if you touched it to the lips of a person, the person would drop
+dead. She told Little Rosebud to protect herself with it if they chased
+her. But she didn't get a chance to see whether it would work or not,
+for when she heard them coming back of her after while with the
+bloodhounds barking, she dropped with terror down flat on her stummick.
+She had suffered so much she couldn't stand anything more. The doctors
+said she was dead when they picked her up, and they buried her and stuck
+a little white slab on her grave, with 'Rosebud, aged sixteen' on it."
+
+"Hot air!" from the irrepressible Phoebe.
+
+I felt that courtesy required I should agree upon that point, and I did
+so, conservatively, venturing to ask the name of the author.
+
+Mrs. Smith mentioned the name of a well-known writer of trashy fiction
+and added, "Didn't you never read none of her books?"
+
+My negative surprised her. Then Phoebe asked:
+
+"Did you ever read 'Daphne Vernon; or, A Coronet of Shame'?"
+
+"No, I haven't read them, either," I replied.
+
+"Oh, mama! Carry me out and let me die!" groaned Mrs. Smith, throwing
+down her paste-brush and falling forward in mock agony upon the smeared
+table.
+
+"Water! Water!" gasped Phoebe, clutching wildly at her throat; "I'm
+going to faint!"
+
+"What's the matter? What did I say that wasn't right?" I cried, the
+nature of their antics showing only too plainly that I had "put my foot
+in it" in some unaccountable manner. But they paid no attention.
+Mortified and utterly at sea, I watched their convulsed shoulders and
+heard their smothered giggles. Then in a few minutes they straightened
+up and resumed work with the utmost gravity of countenance and without a
+word of explanation.
+
+"What was it you was asking?" Phoebe inquired presently, with the most
+innocent air possible.
+
+"I said I hadn't read the books you mentioned," I replied, trying to
+hide the chagrin and mortification I felt at being so ignominiously
+laughed at.
+
+"Eyether of them?" chirped Mrs. Smith, with a vicious wink.
+
+"Eyether of them?" warbled Phoebe in her mocking-bird soprano.
+
+It was my turn to drop the paste-brush now. Eye-ther! It must have
+slipped from my tongue unconsciously. I could not remember having ever
+pronounced the word like that before.
+
+I didn't feel equal, then and there, to offering them any explanation or
+apologies for the offense. So I simply answered:
+
+"No; are they very good? are they as good as 'Little Rosebud's Lovers'?"
+
+"No, it ain't," said Mrs. Smith, decisively and a little contemptuously;
+"and it ain't two books, eye-ther; it's all in one--'Daphne Vernon; or,
+A Coronet of Shame.'"
+
+"Well, now I think it is," put in Phoebe. "Them stories with two-handled
+names is nearly always good. I'll buy a book with a two-handled name
+every time before I'll buy one that ain't. I was reading a good one last
+night that I borrowed from Gladys Carringford. It had three handles to
+its name, and they was all corkers."
+
+"Why don't you spit 'em out?" suggested Mrs. Smith. "Tell us what it
+was."
+
+"Well, it was 'Doris; or, The Pride of Pemberton Mills; or, Lost in a
+Fearful Fate's Abyss.' What d' ye think of that?"
+
+"It sounds very int'resting. Who wrote it?"
+
+"Charles Garvice," replied Phoebe. "Didn't you ever read none of his,
+e--y--e--ther?"
+
+"No, I must say I never did," I answered, ignoring their mischievous
+raillery with as much grace as I could summon, but taking care to choose
+my words so as to avoid further pitfalls.
+
+"And did you never read none of Charlotte M. Braeme's?" drawled Mrs.
+Smith, with remorseless cruelty--"none of Charlotte M. Braeme's,
+eye-ther?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Nor none by Effie Adelaide Rowlands, e--y--e-ther?" still persisted
+Mrs. Smith.
+
+"No; none by her."
+
+"E--y--e--ther!" Both my tormentors now raised their singing-voices into
+a high, clear, full-blown note of derisive music, held it for a brief
+moment at a dizzy altitude, and then in soft, long-drawn-out cadences
+returned to earth and speaking-voices again.
+
+"What kind of story-books do you read, then?" they demanded. To which I
+replied with the names of a dozen or more of the simple, every-day
+classics that the school-boy and-girl are supposed to have read. They
+had never heard of "David Copperfield" or of Dickens. Nor had they ever
+heard of "Gulliver's Travels," nor of "The Vicar of Wakefield." They had
+heard the name "Robinson Crusoe," but they did not know it was the name
+of an entrancing romance. "Little Women," "John Halifax, Gentleman,"
+"The Cloister and the Hearth," "Les Misérables," were also unknown,
+unheard-of literary treasures. They were equally ignorant of the
+existence of the conventional Sunday-school romance. They stared at me
+in amazement when I rattled off a heterogeneous assortment from the
+fecund pens of Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, "Pansy," Amanda M. Douglas, and
+similar good-goody writers for good-goody girls; their only remarks
+being that their titles didn't sound interesting. I spoke
+enthusiastically of "Little Women," telling them how I had read it four
+times, and that I meant to read it again some day. Their curiosity was
+aroused over the unheard-of thing of anybody ever wanting to read any
+book more than once, and they pressed me to reciprocate by repeating the
+story for them, which I did with great accuracy of statement, and with
+genuine pleasure to myself at being given an opportunity to introduce
+anybody to Meg and Jo and all the rest of that delightful March family.
+When I had finished, Phoebe stopped her cornering and Mrs. Smith looked
+up from her label-pasting.
+
+"Why, that's no story at all," the latter declared.
+
+"Why, no," echoed Phoebe; "that's no story--that's just everyday
+happenings. I don't see what's the use putting things like that in
+books. I'll bet any money that lady what wrote it knew all them boys and
+girls. They just sound like real, live people; and when you was telling
+about them I could just see them as plain as plain could be--couldn't
+you, Gwendolyn?"
+
+"Yep," yawned our vis-à-vis, undisguisedly bored.
+
+"But I suppose farmer folks likes them kind of stories," Phoebe
+generously suggested. "They ain't used to the same styles of anything
+that us city folks are."
+
+While we had been trying to forget our tired limbs in a discussion of
+literary tastes and standards, our workmates had been relieving the
+treadmill tedium of the long afternoon by various expedients. The
+quartet at the table immediately in front of us had been making inane
+doggerel rhymes upon the names of their workmates, telling riddles, and
+exchanging nasty stories with great gusto and frequent fits of wild
+laughter. At another table the forthcoming ball of the "Moonlight
+Maids" was under hot discussion, and at a very long table in front of
+the elevator they were talking in subdued voices about dreams and omens,
+making frequent reference to a greasy volume styled "The Lucky Dream
+Book."
+
+Far over, under the windows, the stripper girls were tuning up their
+voices preparatory to the late-afternoon concert, soon to begin. They
+hummed a few bars of one melody, then of another; and at last, Angela's
+voice leading, there burst upon the room in full chorus, to the rhythmic
+whir of the wheels, the melodious music and maudlin stanzas of "The
+Fatal Wedding."
+
+Phoebe lent her flute-like soprano to the next song, the rather pretty
+melody of which was not sufficient to redeem the banality of the words:
+
+
+     "The scene is a banquet where beauty and wealth
+       Have gathered in splendid array;
+     But silent and sad is a fair woman there,
+       Whose young heart is pining away.
+
+     "A card is brought to her--she reads there a name
+       Of one that she loved long ago;
+     Then sadly she whispers, 'Just say I'm not here,
+       For my story he never must know.'
+
+     "That night in the banquet at Misery Hall
+       She reigned like a queen on a throne;
+     But often the tears filled her beautiful eyes
+       As she dreamed of the love she had known.
+
+     "Her thoughts flowed along through the laughter and song
+       To the days she could never recall,
+     And she longed to find rest on her dear mother's breast
+       At the banquet in Misery Hall.
+
+     "The time passes quickly, and few in the throng
+       Have noticed the one vacant chair--
+     Till out of the beautiful garden beyond
+       A pistol-shot rings on the air.
+
+     "Now see, in the moonlight a handsome youth lays--
+       Too quickly his life doth depart;
+     While kneeling beside him, the woman he'd loved
+       Finds her picture is close to his heart."
+
+
+"What is the name of that song?" I asked when the last cadence of
+Phoebe's voice, which was sustained long after every other in the room
+was hushed, had died away.
+
+"That! Why, it's 'The Banquet in Misery Hall,'" answered Mrs. Smith,
+somewhat impatient of my unfolding ignorance. But I speedily forgot the
+rebuke in a lively interest in the songs that followed one another
+without interlude. Phoebe was counting her pile of boxes and ranging
+them into piles of twelve high; so she couldn't sing, and I,
+consequently, could not catch all the words of each song. The theme in
+every case was a more or less ungrammatical, crude, and utterly banal
+rendition of the claptrap morality exploited in the cheap story-books.
+Reduced to the last analysis, they had to do with but one subject--the
+frailty of woman. On the one side was presented Virtue tempted,
+betrayed, repentant; on the other side, Virtue fighting at bay,
+persecuted, scourged, but emerging in the end unspotted and victorious,
+with all good things added unto it.
+
+It was to me an entirely new way of looking at life; and though I
+couldn't in the least explain it to myself, it seemed, to my
+unsophisticated way of looking at such matters, that the propensity to
+break the seventh commandment was much exaggerated, and that songs about
+other subjects would have been much more interesting and not nearly so
+trying to the feelings. For the sweet voices of the singers could not
+but make the tears come to my eyes, in spite of the fact that the burden
+of the song seemed so unworthy.
+
+"You all sing so beautifully!" I cried, in honest admiration, at the
+close of one particularly melodious and extremely silly ditty. "Where
+did you learn?"
+
+Phoebe was pleased at the compliment implied by the tears in my eyes,
+and even Mrs. Smith forgot to throw out her taunting "eye-ther" as she
+stood still and regarded my very frank and unconcealed emotion.
+
+"I guess we sort of learn from the Ginney girls," explained Phoebe.
+"Them Ginneys is all nice singers, and everybody in the shop kind of
+gets into the way of singing good, too, from being with them. You ought
+to hear them sing Dago songs, oughtn't she, Gwendolyn?"
+
+"Yep," answered Gwendolyn; "I could just die hearing Angela and Celie
+Polatta singing that--what-d'ye-call-it, that always makes a body bu'st
+out crying?"
+
+"You mean 'Punchinello.' Yep, that's a corker; but, Lord! the one what
+makes me have all kinds of funny cold feelings run up my back is that
+'Ave Maria.' Therese Nicora taught them--what she says she learned in
+the old country. I wouldn't want anything to eat if I could hear songs
+like that all the time."
+
+The clock-hands over Annie Kinzer's desk had now crept close to the hour
+of six, and Angela had only begun the first stanza of--
+
+
+     "Papa, tell me where is mama," cried a little girl one day;
+     "I'm so lonesome here without her, tell me why she went away.
+     You don't know how much I'm longing for her loving
+       good-night kiss!"
+     Papa placed his arms around her as he softly whispered this:
+
+     "Down in the City of Sighs and Tears, under the white
+       light's glare,
+     Down in the City of Wasted Years, you'll find your mama there,
+     Wandering along where each smiling face hides its story of
+       lost careers;
+     And perhaps she is dreaming of you to-night, in the City of Sighs
+      and Tears."
+
+
+The machinery gave a ponderous throb, the great black belts sagged and
+fell inert, the wheels whirred listlessly, clocks all over the great
+city began to toll for one more long day ended and gone, while the
+voices of the girl toilers rose superbly and filled the gathering
+stillness with the soft crescendo refrain:
+
+
+     "Wandering along where each smiling face hides its story of
+       lost careers;
+     And perhaps she is dreaming of you to-night, in the City of
+       Sighs and Tears--
+     In the City of Sighs and Tears."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+IN WHICH I ACQUIRE A STORY-BOOK NAME AND MAKE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF MISS
+HENRIETTA MANNERS
+
+
+Before entering upon my second day's work at the box-factory, and before
+detailing any of the strange things which that day brought forth, I feel
+it incumbent upon me to give some word of explanation as to my
+whereabouts during the intervening night. It will be remembered that
+when I left the factory at the end of the first day, I had neither a
+lodging nor a trunk. I will not dwell upon the state of my feelings when
+I walked out of Thompson Street in the consciousness that if I had been
+friendless and homeless before, I was infinitely more so now. I will say
+nothing of the ache in my heart when my thoughts traveled toward the
+pile of ruins in Fourteenth Street, with the realization of my
+helplessness, my sheer inability even to attempt to do a one last humble
+little act of love and gratitude for the dead woman who had been truly
+my friend.
+
+Briefly stated, the facts are these: I had, all told, one dollar, and I
+walked from Thompson Street straight to the Jefferson Market
+police-station, which was not a great distance away. I stated my case to
+the matron, a kindly Irishwoman. I was afraid to start out so late in
+the evening to look for a lodging for the night. I would have thought
+nothing of such a thing a few weeks previous, but the knowledge of life
+which I had gained in my brief residence in Fourteenth Street and from
+the advice of Mrs. Pringle had showed me the danger that lurked in such
+a course. The police matron said my fears were well founded, and she
+gave me the address of a working-girls' home over on the East Side,
+which she said was not the pleasantest place in the world for a
+well-brought-up girl of refinement and intelligence, such as she took me
+to be, but was cheap, and in which I would be sure of the protection
+which any young, inexperienced woman without money needs so badly in
+this wicked city. She wrote down the address for me, and I had started
+to the door of her little office when her motherly eye noticed how
+fagged out and lame I was--and indeed I could scarcely stand--and with a
+wave of her plump arm she brought me back to her desk.
+
+"Why don't you stay here with me to-night?" she asked. "You needn't
+mind; and if I was you I would do it and save my pennies and my tired
+legs. You can have a bite of supper with me, and then bundle right off
+to bed. You look clean tuckered out."
+
+So to my fast-growing list of startling experiences I added a night in
+the station-house; but a very quiet, uneventful night it was, because
+the matron tucked me away in her own little room. That is, it was quiet
+and uneventful so far as my surroundings were concerned, though I slept
+little on account of my aching bones. All night I tossed, pain-racked
+and discouraged; for, after all the long, hard day's work of the day
+before, Phoebe's card had only checked one dollar and five cents, which
+represented two persons' work. Such being the case, how could I expect
+to grow sufficiently skilful and expeditious to earn enough to keep body
+and soul together in the brief apprenticeship I had looked forward to?
+Unable to sleep, I was up an hour earlier than usual, and after I had
+breakfasted--again by the courtesy of the matron--I was off to work long
+before the working-day began.
+
+I had thought to be the first arrival, but I was not. A girl was already
+bending over her paste-pot, and the revelers of the "Ladies' Moonlight
+Pleasure Club" came straggling in by twos and threes. Some of the weary
+dancers had dropped to sleep, still wearing their ball-gowns and
+slippers and bangles and picture-hats, their faces showing ghastly white
+and drawn in the mote-ridden sunbeams that fell through the dirty
+windows. Others were busy doffing Cinderella garments, which rites were
+performed with astounding frankness in the open spaces of the big loft.
+
+"Oh, Henrietta, you had ought to been there," Georgiana gushed, dropping
+her lace-trimmed petticoats about her feet and struggling to unhook her
+corsets. "It was grand, but I'm tired to death; and oh, dear! I've
+another blow-out to-night, and the 'Clover Leaf' to-morrow night!" With
+a weary yawn, the society queen departed with her finery.
+
+"You didn't go to the ball?" I suggested to the girl addressed as
+Henrietta, and whom I now recalled as one who had worked frantically all
+the day before.
+
+"Me? No. I don't believe in dancing," she replied, without looking up.
+"Our church's down on it. I came early to get ahead with my order. You
+can do more work when there's not so many round."
+
+Such strict conformity to her religious scruples, combined with such
+pathetic industry, seemed to augur well for the superior worth of this
+tall, blonde, blue-eyed girl. I was anxious to make a friend of her,
+and accordingly proffered my services until Phoebe should come to claim
+me. She accepted gladly, and for the first time looked up and rewarded
+me with a smile. I caught a glimpse of an unprepossessing
+countenance--despite rather good features and fine hair--the most
+striking characteristics of which were a missing front tooth and lips
+that hung loose and colorless.
+
+As we worked, the conversation became cordial. She inquired my name, and
+I repeated the plain, homely Scotch-Irish cognomen that had been handed
+down to me by my forefathers.
+
+"Why don't you get a pretty name?" she asked, in a matter-of-fact tone.
+"All the girls do it when they come to the factory to work. It don't
+cost no more to have a high-sounding name."
+
+Much interested, I protested, half in fun, that I didn't know any name
+to take, and begged her to suggest one. She was silent for a moment.
+
+"Well, last night," she went on--"last night I was reading a story about
+two girls that was both mashed on the same feller. He was rich and they
+was poor and worked, and one of them was called 'Rose Fortune.'"
+
+"That's a very pretty name," I remarked.
+
+"Isn't it, though? Rose Fortune--ever so much prettier than your own.
+Say, why don't you take it, and I'll begin calling you by it right
+away."
+
+"And what's your name?" I ventured.
+
+"Mine? Oh, mine's Henrietta Manners; only," she added hastily--"only
+that's my real name. I was born with it. Now most of the girls got
+theirs out of story-books. Georgiana Trevelyan and Goldy Courtleigh and
+Gladys Carringford and Angelina Lancaster and Phoebe Arlington--them
+girls all got theirs out of stories. But mine's my own. You see," and
+she drew near that no other ear might hear the secret of her proud
+birth--"you see, Manners was my mother's name, and she ran away and
+married my papa against her rich father's wishes. He was a banker. I
+mean mama's papa was a banker, but my papa was only a poor young
+gentleman. So grandfather cut her off without a cent in his will, but
+left everything to me if I would take the name of Manners."
+
+The heroine of this strange romance stopped for breath, and if I had
+cherished any doubts of the truth of her story in the beginning, at
+least I was sure now that she believed it all herself; one glance into
+her steady blue eyes, in which a telltale moisture was already
+gathering, was proof of that.
+
+"No, indeed," continued Miss Manners: "I haven't always been a
+working-girl. I used to go to boarding-school. I thought I'd be a
+governess or something, and once I tried to learn bookkeeping, but my
+eyes give out, and the figures mixed up my brain so, and then I got sick
+and had to come to this box-factory. But I'm the first Manners that ever
+worked."
+
+I was now thoroughly ashamed of my first unjust suspicions that
+Henrietta might not be strictly truthful, and I inquired with sincere
+interest as to the fate of her ill-starred family.
+
+"All dead and sleeping in our family vault," she replied wistfully. "But
+don't let us talk anything more about it. I get so worked up and mad
+when I talk about the Mannerses and the way they treated me and my poor
+parents!"
+
+The threatened spell with Henrietta's nerves was averted by a sudden
+turning on of the power, and the day's work began. Phoebe did not appear
+to claim me, and I worked away as fast as I could to help swell
+Henrietta's dividends.
+
+"I guess you can stay with her the rest of the day," Annie Kinzer said,
+stopping at the table. "The 'Moonlight Maids' must have been too much
+for Phoebe. Guess she won't show up to-day."
+
+Henrietta was naturally delighted with the arrangement, which would add
+a few pennies to her earnings. "I only made sixty cents yesterday, and I
+worked like a dog," she remarked. "It was a bad day for everybody. We
+ought to make more than a dollar to-day. Phoebe says you're a hustler."
+
+Our job was that of finishing five hundred ruching-boxes. Henrietta
+urged me frequently to hurry, as we were away behind with the order. I
+soon discovered that for all her Manners blood and alleged gentle
+breeding, she was a harder taskmaster than the good-natured but plebeian
+Phoebe. Her obvious greed for every moment of my time, for every
+possible effort of my strength and energy, I gladly excused, however,
+when she revealed the fact that all her surplus earnings went toward the
+support of a certain mission Sunday-school in which she was a teacher.
+The conversation drifted from church matters to my own personal affairs.
+
+"Isn't it awful lonesome living alone in a room?"
+
+"How did you know I lived in a room?" I inquired in surprise, with the
+uncomfortable feeling that I had been the subject of ill-natured gossip.
+
+"Oh, Annie Kinzer told me. Say, I wouldn't tell her anything about my
+affairs. She's an awful clack."
+
+We were silent for a moment, while I wondered if Henrietta, if Annie
+Kinzer, if any girl in all the world could ever guess how lonely I had
+been every moment since I had come to this great city to work and to
+live. Then came the unexpected.
+
+"Wouldn't you like to come and room with me?"
+
+"With you?" I was half pleased, half doubtful.
+
+"Yes. I've got plenty of room."
+
+"Perhaps I couldn't afford it."
+
+"Yes, you can. I don't put on style. It won't cost us more than a dollar
+and a half a week for each--rent, eating, and everything else. I was
+thinking, as you're a learner, it will be a long time before you can
+make much, and you'd be glad to go halvers with somebody. Two can always
+live cheaper than one."
+
+A dollar and a half a week! That was indeed cheaper than I had been
+living. I had something less than two dollars in my purse, and pay-day,
+for me, was still a week off.
+
+And so I accepted the proposition, and by lunch-time the news was all
+over the factory that the new girl was to be Henrietta's room-mate.
+Annie Kinzer--everybody, in fact--approved, except, possibly, Emma. Emma
+was a homely, plainly dressed girl who had worked ten years here at
+Springer's. She bore the reputation of being a prudey and a kill-joy.
+Thus far she had never deigned to look at me, but now she took occasion
+to pass the time of day when we met at the water-faucet, and asked, in a
+doubtful tone, how long I had known Henrietta Manners.
+
+Meanwhile we "cornered" and "tissued" and "laced" and "labeled." Higher
+and higher grew our pasteboard castle, which we built as children pile
+up brightly colored blocks. At eleven Henrietta sent me below for
+trimmings.
+
+"How do you like your job?" asked the young fellow who filled my order.
+This was strictly conventional, and I responded in kind. While Charlie
+cut tapes and counted labels, he made the most of his opportunity to
+chat. Dismissing, with brief comment, the weather and the peculiar
+advantages and disadvantages of box-making as a trade, he diplomatically
+steered the talk along personal and social lines by suggesting, with a
+suppressed sigh, the probability that I should not always be a
+box-maker. I replied heartily that I hoped not, which precipitated
+another question: "Is the day set yet?" My amused negative to the query,
+and intimation that I had no "steady," were gratefully received, and
+warranted the suggestion that, as a matter of course, I liked to go to
+balls.
+
+"My pleasure club has a blow-out next Sunday night," he remarked
+significantly, as I gathered up my trimmings and departed.
+
+During my five minutes' absence the most exciting event of the day had
+occurred. Adrienne, one of the strippers, had just been carried away,
+unconscious, with two bleeding finger-stumps. In an unguarded moment the
+fingers had been cut off in her machine. Although their work does not
+allow them to stop a moment, her companions were all loud in sympathy
+for this misfortune, which is not rare. Little Jennie, the unfortunate
+girl's turner-in and fellow-worker for two years, wept bitterly as she
+wiped away the blood from the long, shining knife and prepared to take
+the place of her old superior, with its increased wage of five dollars
+and a half a week. The little girl had been making only three dollars
+and a quarter, and so, as Henrietta remarked, "It's a pretty bad
+accident that don't bring good to somebody."
+
+"Did they take her away in a carriage?" Henrietta asked of Goldy
+Courtleigh, who had stopped a moment to rest at our table.
+
+"Well, I should say! What's the use of getting your fingers whacked off
+if you can't get a carriage-ride out of it?"
+
+"Yes, and that's about the only way you'd ever squeeze a carriage-ride
+out of this company," commented Henrietta. "Now I've two lady-friends
+who work in mills where a sick headache and a fainting-spell touch the
+boss for a carriage-ride every time!"
+
+The order on which we worked was, like most of the others on the floor
+that day, for late-afternoon delivery. Our ruching-boxes had to be
+finished that day, even though it took every moment till six or even
+seven o'clock. Saturday being what is termed a "short-day," one had to
+work with might and main in order to leave at half-past four. This
+Henrietta was very anxious to do, partly because she had her Easter
+shopping to do, and partly because this was the night I was to be
+installed in my new quarters. Lunch-time found us still far behind.
+Therefore we did not stop to eat, but snatched bites of cake and
+sandwich as hunger dictated, and convenience permitted, all the while
+pasting and labeling and taping our boxes. Nor were we the only toilers
+obliged to forgo the hard-earned half-hour of rest.
+
+The awakening thunder of the machinery burst gratefully on our ears. It
+meant that the last half of the weary day had begun. How my blistered
+hands ached now! How my swollen feet and ankles throbbed with pain!
+Every girl limped now as she crossed the floor with her towering
+burden, and the procession back and forth between machines and tables
+began all over again. Lifting and carrying and shoving; cornering and
+taping and lacing--it seemed as though the afternoon would never wear to
+an end.
+
+The whole great mill was now charged with an unaccustomed excitement--an
+excitement which had in it something of solemnity. There was no sign of
+the usual mirth and hilarity which constitute the mill's sole
+attraction. There was no singing--not even Angelina's "Fatal Wedding."
+No exchange of stories, no sallies. Each girl bent to her task with a
+fierce energy that was almost maddening in its intensity.
+
+Blind and dizzy with fatigue, I peered down the long, dusty aisles of
+boxes toward the clock above Annie Kinzer's desk. It was only two. Every
+effort, human and mechanical, all over the great factory, was now
+strained almost to the breaking-point. How long can this agony last? How
+long can the roar and the rush and the throbbing pain continue until
+that nameless and unknown something snaps like an overstrained
+fiddle-string and brings relief? The remorseless clock informed us that
+there were two hours more of this torture before the signal to "clean
+up"--a signal, however, which is not given until the last girl has
+finished her allotted task. At half-past two it appeared hopeless even
+to dream of getting out before the regular six o'clock.
+
+The head foreman rushed through the aisles and bawled to us to "hustle
+for all we were worth," as customers were all demanding their goods.
+
+"My God! ain't we hustling?" angrily shouted Rosie Sweeny, a pretty girl
+at the next table, who supplied most of the profanity for our end of the
+room. "God Almighty! how I hate Easter and Christmas-time! Oh, my legs
+is 'most breaking," and with that the overwrought girl burst into a
+passionate tirade against everybody, the foreman included, and all the
+while she never ceased to work.
+
+There were not many girls in the factory like Rosie. Hers were the
+quickest fingers, the sharpest tongue, the prettiest face. She was
+scornful, impatient, and passionate--qualities not highly developed in
+her companions, and which in her case foreboded ill if one believed
+Annie Kinzer's prophecy: "That Rosie Sweeny 'll go to the bad yet, you
+mark my words."
+
+Three o'clock, a quarter after, half-past! The terrific tension had all
+but reached the breaking-point. Then there rose a trembling,
+palpitating sigh that seemed to come from a hundred throats, and
+blended in a universal expression of relief. In her clear, high treble
+Angelina began the everlasting "Fatal Wedding." That piece of false
+sentiment had now a new significance. It became a song of deliverance,
+and as the workers swelled the chorus, one by one, it meant that the end
+of the day's toil was in sight.
+
+By four o'clock the last box was done. Machines became mute, wheels were
+stilled, and the long black belts sagged into limp folds. Every girl
+seized a broom or a scrub-pail, and hilarity reigned supreme while we
+swept and scrubbed for the next half-hour, Angelina and her chorus
+singing all the while endless stanzas of the "Fatal Wedding."
+
+Henrietta sent me for a fresh pail of water, which I got from the faucet
+in the toilet-room; and as I filled my bucket I made a mental inventory
+of my fellow-toilers' wardrobes. Hanging from rows of nails on all sides
+were their street garments--a collection of covert-cloth jackets, light
+tan automobile coats, black silk box-coats trimmed in white lace,
+raglans, and every other style of fashionable wrap that might be cheaply
+imitated. Sandwiched among the street garments were the trained skirts
+and evening bodices of the "Moonlight Maids" of the night before, and
+which were to be again disported at some other pleasure-club festivity
+that Easter evening, now drawing near. Along the walls were ranged the
+high-heeled shoes and slippers, a bewildering display of gilt buckles
+and velvet bows; each pair waiting patiently for the swollen, tired feet
+of their owner to carry them away to the ball. The hats on the shelf
+above were in strict accord with the gowns and the cloaks and the
+foot-gear--a gorgeous assortment of Easter millinery, wherein the
+beflowered and beplumed picture-hat predominated.
+
+I hurried back with my bucket of water, hoping in my heart that the
+pleasure their wearers got out of this finery might be as great as the
+day's work which earned it was long and hard. And so indeed it must have
+been, if Henrietta was any authority on such questions.
+
+"I love nice clothes, even if I do have to work hard to get them," she
+remarked, as we turned into Bleecker Street a few minutes later, four
+one-dollar bills safely tucked away in her stocking. "But say, you ought
+to see my new hat. It's elegant," and drawing my arm through hers, my
+new room-mate hurried me through the Saturday-evening crowd of
+homeward-bound humanity.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+WHEREIN I WALK THROUGH DARK AND DEVIOUS WAYS WITH HENRIETTA MANNERS
+
+
+It had been an ideal day for March--a day touched with pale-yellow
+sunshine in which one felt the thrill and the promise of the springtime,
+despite the chill east wind.
+
+Into the murky, evil-smelling squalor of Thompson Street this shy
+primrose sunshine had poured in the earlier part of the afternoon; but,
+being a north-and-south thoroughfare, it had all filtered out by
+half-past four, only to empty itself with increased warmth and glory
+into the east-and-west cross-streets, leaving Thompson dim and cold by
+comparison when Henrietta Manners and I emerged from Springer's.
+
+Henrietta wore a dusty picture-hat of black velvet with a straight
+ostrich feather and streamers of soiled white tulle, and a shabby
+golf-cape of blue and white check which was not quite long enough to
+conceal the big brass safety-pins with which her trained skirt was
+tucked up, and which she had forgotten to remove until we had gone some
+yards down the street. While we stopped long enough for her to perform
+this most important sartorial detail, my eye traversed the street before
+us, which with a gentle descent drops downward and stretches away toward
+the south--a long, dim, narrow vista, broken at regular intervals by
+brilliant shafts of gold streaming from the sunlit cross-streets, and
+giving to the otherwise squalid brick-walled cañon the appearance of a
+gay checkered ribbon. But if the March sunshine had deserted Thompson
+Street, the March winds still claimed it as their own. Up and down they
+had swept all day, until the morning mud on the cobblestones had been
+long dried up and turned to dust, which now swirled along, caught up in
+innumerable little whirlwinds that went eddying down the street.
+
+Grabbing up her demi-train in her bare hand, Henrietta and I also eddied
+down the street and were lost to view for a few moments in the whirlwind
+which struck us at the crowded corner of Bleecker Street.
+
+This whirlwind was the result partly of physical and partly of human
+forces. For it was Saturday night, and life was running at flood-tide
+all over the great city. Always tempestuous, always disturbed with the
+passion and pain and strife of its struggle to maintain the ground it
+had gained, never for one brief moment calm, even at its lowest
+ebb--now, on this last night of the long, weary week, all the currents
+and counter-currents of the worker's world were suddenly released. At
+the stroke of bell, at the clang of deep-mouthed gong, at the scream of
+siren whistle, the sluice-gates were lifted from the great human
+reservoirs of factory and shop and office, and their myriad toilers
+burst forth with the cumulative violence of six days' restraint.
+
+It was a shabby carnival of nations that jostled one another at this
+windy corner--Italian, Spanish, German, Slav, Jew, Greek, with a
+preponderance of Irish and "free-born" Americans. The general air was
+one of unwonted happiness and freedom. The atmosphere of holiday liberty
+was vibrant with the expectation of Saturday-night abandon to fun and
+frolic or wild carousal.
+
+For "the ghost had walked" through the workaday world that day, and
+everybody had his "envelop" in his pocket. It is a pleasant sensation to
+feel the stiff-cornered envelop tucked safely away in your vest pocket,
+or in the depths of your stocking, where Henrietta had hidden hers safe
+out of the reach of the wily pickpocket, who, she told me, was lurking
+at every corner and sneaking through every crowd on that Saturday
+evening, which was also Easter Eve.
+
+Easter Eve! I had almost forgotten the fact which accounted for this
+more than usual activity on the part of the hurrying crowds, and for the
+unmistakable holiday air which Bleecker Street displayed. As far as we
+could see, lined up on both sides of the curb were the pushcart
+peddlers, and at every step a sidewalk fakir, all crying their Easter
+wares.
+
+Henrietta lingered first about one pushcart, then about another, opening
+her gaudy side-bag, then shutting it resolutely and marching on,
+determined not to succumb to the temptation to squander her hard-earned
+pennies. She succeeded admirably until we came upon a picturesque
+Italian and his wife who were doing a flourishing business from a
+pushcart piled high with sacred images. Henrietta showed a lively
+interest in the cut prices at which they were going: ten cents for St.
+Peter in a scarlet robe and golden sandals; fifteen cents for St. John
+in purple; and only twenty-five for the Blessed Virgin in flowing blue
+clasping the Holy Babe.
+
+They were "dirt-cheap," Henrietta declared, as we watched the plaster
+casts pass over the heads of the crowd, out of which by and by emerged
+our shopmate, little Angela, clasping a Madonna under her arm and
+counting her change.
+
+The three of us resumed our homeward walk together, without any comment
+until Angela had satisfied herself about the correctness of her change.
+
+"What a slop you are!" remarked Henrietta, as her critical eye swept
+over the undeveloped little figure in the long, greasy black-taffeta
+coat, which, flapping open in front, disclosed the pasty surface of a
+drabbled blue skirt. "Why don't you never turn your skirt, Angela?"
+
+"Oh, what's the dif?" replied Angela. "There ain't no fellows going to
+look at me any more now."
+
+This reply, commonplace enough, might have passed unnoticed had there
+not been a note of tragedy in her deep contralto voice.
+
+"Why, what's the matter?" I asked.
+
+"Don't you know?" she demanded, scowling at Henrietta's silly, vacant
+"tee-hee."
+
+"Know? Know what?" I asked.
+
+"That I'm a grass-widow."
+
+"A grass-widow!" I echoed in astonishment, and looked upon the childish
+creature in sheer unbelief--for child I had always considered her. "Why,
+how old are you, anyway, Angela?"
+
+"Fifteen--I mean I'm 'most fifteen."
+
+"And you're really married!" I exclaimed again, quite aghast and
+altogether innocent of the construction which Angela immediately put
+upon the qualifying adverb.
+
+"Well, if you don't believe me look at that!" she cried, and stuck out a
+tiny, dirty hand, with finger-nails worn to the quick, and decorated
+with a gold band broad enough and heavy enough to have held a woman ten
+times Angela's weight and size in the bands of indissoluble matrimony;
+"I was married for fair, and I was married lawful. A priest did it."
+
+"Oh, I didn't mean to question that," I hastened to apologize with some
+confusion. "Only you seemed so very young, I thought you were just
+joking me."
+
+"Well, it's no joke to be married and have a baby, specially when you've
+got to s'port it," returned the girl, her lips still pouting.
+
+"And you've a baby, too--you!"
+
+The bedraggled little prima donna nodded; the pout on the lips blossomed
+into a smile, and a look of infinite tenderness transformed the tired,
+dark little face. "It's up to the crèche--that's where I'm going now.
+The ladies keeps it awful good for me."
+
+"And it's such a lovely baby, too!" declared Henrietta, softly. "I seen
+it once."
+
+"She's cute; there's no lie 'bout that," assented the little mother.
+"Look what I bought her--here, you hold this Peter a minute--Henrietta,
+just hang on to the Holy Virgin," and thrusting them into our hands, she
+opened the box under her arm and drew forth a gaily painted hen that
+clucked and laid a painted egg, to the uproarious delight of Henrietta.
+
+Henrietta meanwhile had begun counting the change in her side-bag.
+
+"I don't never like to break a bill unless I've got to," she remarked,
+returning the Holy Virgin to Angela's arms; "but I'm going to have one
+of them chickens too," and away she went after the fakir. A moment later
+she emerged from the crowd with a little brown box under her arm, and we
+three continued our walk westward along Bleecker, dropping little Angela
+at the corner of the street which was to lead her to the day-nursery
+where she would pick up her baby and carry it home.
+
+"That was a 'fatal wedding' for fair, wasn't it?" I remarked, as my eyes
+followed the little figure.
+
+But my companion paid no attention to my attempt to be facetious, if
+indeed she heard the remark at all. She seemed to be deep in a brown
+study, and several times I caught her watching me narrowly from the
+corner of her eye. I was already beginning to have some misgivings as
+to the temperamental fitness of my strange "learner" and new-found
+friend as a steady, day-in-and-day-out person with whom to live and eat
+and sleep. And this feeling increased with every block we covered, for
+by and by I found myself studying Henrietta in the same furtive manner
+as she was evidently studying me.
+
+At last, when we had exchanged the holiday gaiety and the sunshine of
+Bleecker Street for a dark, noisome side-street, she broke out
+explosively:
+
+"Hope to God you ain't going to turn out the way my last room-mate did!"
+
+"Why? What did she do?"
+
+"Went crazy," came the laconic reply, and she shivered and drew the old
+golf-cape more closely about her shoulders; for the damp of the dark,
+silent tenements on either side seemed to strike to the marrow.
+Something in her manner seemed to say, "Ask no more questions," but
+nevertheless I pursued the subject.
+
+"Went crazy! How?"
+
+"I d'know; she just went sudden crazy. She come to Springer's one day
+just like you, and she said how she was wanting to find a place to board
+cheap; and she was kind of down in the mouth, and she come home with me;
+and all of a sudden in the night I woke up with her screamin' and going
+on something fearful, and I run down and got the Dago lady in the
+basement to come up, and her man run for the police. They took her away
+to the lock-up in the hurry-up wagon, and the next day they said she was
+crazy,--clean crazy,--and she's in the crazy-house over on the Island
+now."
+
+"What island?" I asked, not with any desire to know this minor detail,
+but because I was too disturbed for the moment to make any other
+comment. It seemed to Henrietta, however, a most senseless question, for
+she remarked rather testily:
+
+"Why, just the Island, where they send all the crazy folks, and the
+drunks, and the thieves and murderers, and them that has smallpox."
+
+"Mercy! what an awful place it must be!" I cried. "And that's where the
+poor girl went?"
+
+"That's where she went--say, tell me honest now, didn't you run away?"
+
+"Run away! Where from?"
+
+"Run away from home--now didn't you?"
+
+"Mercy, no! What put such an idea as that in your head?" I asked,
+laughing.
+
+"Fanny Harley did."
+
+"Who's Fanny Harley?"
+
+"She's the girl they took to the crazy-house."
+
+"But," I argued, "is that any reason for you to suppose that I ran away
+from home too?"
+
+"Yep, it is. You're ever so much like Fanny Harley. You talk just alike,
+and you've got just the same notions she had, from what I can make; and
+she did run away from home. She told me so. She lived up-state
+somewhere, and was off a farm just like you; and--"
+
+"But I'm not a farmer, and never was," I put in.
+
+"Why, you told me yourself you was born in the country, didn't you?" and
+I saw there was no use trying to point out to Henrietta the difference
+between farmers and those born in the country, both of which were terms
+of contempt in her vocabulary. We were still threading the maze of
+strange, squalid streets which was to lead us eventually to the former
+brief abiding-place of Fanny Harley; and, filled with curiosity
+regarding my own resemblance to my unfortunate predecessor, I revived
+the subject by asking carelessly:
+
+"How is it I talk and act that makes me like Fanny Harley?"
+
+"Well, you 've got a kind of high-toned way of talking," she explained.
+"I don't mind the way you talk, though,--using big words and all that.
+That ain't none of our business, I tell the girls; but you do walk so
+funny and stand so funny, that it is all I can do to keep from bu'stin'
+out laughing to see you. And the other girls says it's the same with
+them, but I told them it was because you was just from the country, and
+that farmers all walk the same way. But really, Rose,--you're getting
+used to that name, ain't you?--you ought to get yourself over it as
+quick as you can; you ain't going to have no lady-friends in the factory
+if you're going to be queer like that."
+
+"But I walk as I always did. How else should I walk? How do I walk that
+makes me so funny?" I asked, mortified at the thought of my having been
+the butt of secret ridicule. Henrietta was cordial in her reply.
+
+"You walk too light," she explained; "you don't seem to touch the ground
+at all when you go along, and you stand so straight it makes my back
+ache to watch you."
+
+Then my mentor proceeded to correct my use and choice of diction.
+
+"And what makes you say 'lid' when you mean a cover? Why, it just about
+kills us girls to hear you say 'lid.'"
+
+"But," I remonstrated, aggravated by her silly "tee-hee" into defense of
+my English, "why shouldn't I say 'lid' if I want to? It means just the
+same as cover."
+
+"Well, if it mean the same, why don't you say 'cover'?" my "learner"
+retorted, with ill-disguised anger that I should question her authority;
+and I dropped the subject, and the remainder of the walk was continued
+in silence.
+
+It was growing more and more apparent that I had not made a wise
+selection in my room-mate, but it seemed too late to back out now--at
+least until I had given her a trial of several days.
+
+I felt as though I had obtained, as if by magic, a wonderfully
+illuminating insight into her nature and character during this short
+walk from the factory. I had thought her at the work-table a
+kind-hearted, honest toiler, a bit too visionary, perhaps, to accord
+with perfect veracity, and woefully ignorant, but with an ignorance for
+which I could feel nothing but sorrow and sympathy, as the inevitable
+result of the hard conditions of her life and environment. But now I
+recognized with considerable foreboding, not only all this, but much
+more besides. Henrietta Manners, that humble, under-fed, miserable
+box-maker, was the very incarnation of bigotry and intolerance, one by
+whom any idea, or any act, word, or occurrence out of the ordinary rut
+set by box-factory canons of taste and judgment, must be condemned with
+despotic severity. And yet, in the face of all these unpleasant
+reflections upon poor Henrietta's unbeautiful mental characteristics, I
+felt a certain shamefaced gratitude toward the kind heart which I knew
+still beat under that shabby golf-cape.
+
+Meanwhile, Henrietta had again lapsed into a silent, sullen mood, as she
+pitched along in the nervous, jerky, heavy-footed gait which she had
+urged me to emulate, and which I thought so hideous. I did not know
+then, but I do know now, that such gait is invariably a characteristic
+of the constitution in which there is not the proper coördination of
+muscular effort. In the light of knowledge gained in later years, I can
+now see in that long, slouching, shuffling figure, in that
+tallow-colored face with the bloodless, loose lips and the wandering,
+mystic eyes of periwinkle blue--I can see in that girl-face framed by a
+trashy picture-hat, and in that girl-form wrapped in the old golf-cape,
+one of the earth's unfortunates; a congenital failure; a female creature
+doomed from her mother's womb--physically, mentally, and morally doomed.
+
+I was, however, on this memorable Easter Eve most happily innocent of my
+Lombroso and my Mantagazza, else I had not been walking home with
+Henrietta Manners, in all the confidence of an unsophisticated
+country-girl. So much confidence did I have in my shop-mate that I did
+not yet know the name of the street on the West Side where my future
+home was, nor did I know any of the strange, dark, devious paths by
+which she led me through a locality that, though for the most part
+eminently respectable, is dotted here and there, near the river-front,
+with some of the worst plague-spots of moral and physical foulness to be
+found in New York.
+
+In later and more prosperous years I have several times walked into
+Thompson Street, and from that as a starting-point tried to retrace our
+walk of that night, bordering along old Greenwich Village, but as well
+have tried to unravel the mazes of the Cretan Labyrinth.
+
+The last westward street we traversed, dipping under the trellis of an
+elevated railroad, led straight into a lake of sunset fire out of which
+the smoking funnels of a giant steamship lying at her dock rose dark and
+majestic upon the horizon.
+
+A little cry of admiration escaped me at sight of the splendid picture,
+and I hoped secretly that our way might continue to the water's edge;
+but instead, reaching the line of the elevated, we turned in and
+followed the old, black street above which the noisy trains ran. The
+street itself presented the appearance of a long line of darkened
+warehouses, broken occasionally by a dismal-looking dwelling, through
+the uncurtained windows of which we could see slattern housewives busy
+getting supper.
+
+It was the most miserable and squalid of all the miserable and squalid
+streets I had thus far seen, and it had the additional disadvantage of
+being practically deserted of everything save the noise and smoke
+overhead. There were no foot-passengers, no human sounds. It was all so
+hideous and fearsome that after five minutes' walk I was not surprised
+to see Henrietta select the most wretched of all the wretched houses as
+the one we should enter. As we climbed the high stoop, I could see,
+through the interstices of rusted ironwork that had once been handsome
+balusters, the form of an Italian woman sitting in the basement window
+beneath, nursing a baby at her breast.
+
+"That's the lady what come up to help hold Fanny Harley," my room-mate
+remarked as we passed inside.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+INTRODUCING HENRIETTA'S "SPECIAL GENTLEMAN-FRIEND"
+
+
+"Say! ain't you got no special gentleman-friend?"
+
+Henrietta's voice, breaking a pregnant silence, startled me so that I
+nearly jumped off the empty soap-box where for some minutes I had sat
+watching her bend over a smoking skillet of frying fat.
+
+An answer was not to be given unadvisedly, such was the moral effect of
+the question. It hadn't been asked in a casual way, but showed, by its
+explosive form of utterance, that it was the result not so much of a
+pent-up curiosity as of a careful speculation as to the manner in which
+I would receive it. So I tried to look unconscious, and at this critical
+juncture the thunder of an elevated train came adventitiously to my
+rescue and gave me a few moments in which to consider what I should
+reply. And as I considered unconsciously my eye took in an inventory of
+the room. The heavily carved woodwork hinted of the fact that it had
+once been a lady's bedchamber in the bygone days when this was a
+fashionable quarter of New York, and its spaciousness and former
+elegance now served rather to increase the squalor as well as to
+accentuate the barrenness of its furnishings. The latter consisted of
+two wooden boxes, one of which I sat upon; an empty sugar-barrel, with a
+board laid across the top; a broken-down bed in an uncurtained alcove; a
+very large, substantial-looking trunk, iron-bound and brass-riveted; and
+last, but not least, a rusty stove, now red-hot, which might well have
+been the twin sister of my own "Little Lottie" at the ill-fated
+Fourteenth-street house. This stove, connected with the flue by a small
+pipe, fitted into what had once been a beautiful open fireplace, but
+which was now walled up with broken bricks, and surmounted by a mantel
+of Italian marble sculptured with the story of Prometheus's boon to
+mankind, and supported on either end by caryatides in the shape of
+vestal virgins bearing flaming brands in their hands. Overhead the
+ceiling showed great patches of bare lath, where the plaster had fallen
+away, and the uncarpeted floor was strewn with bread-crumbs and marked
+by a trail of coal-siftings from the stove to a closet-door from which
+the fire was replenished. The door to the closet was gone, and in its
+recess a pair of trousers hung limply, while Henrietta's scant wardrobe
+was ranged along the black-painted wall outside. The long, cobweb-hung
+windows, bare of blind or curtain, showed a black-mirrored surface
+against the batten shutters.
+
+All these details I could descry but dimly by the light of the smoking
+oil-lamp that sat on the mantelshelf above the stove, and which cast a
+ghastly light upon a row of empty bottles--the sole burden of the once
+spotless, but now sadly soiled, vestal virgins.
+
+Henrietta was bending over the smoking skillet, with the lamp-light
+falling across her pale face. As she boiled the coffee and fried the
+eggs I studied her profile sketched against the blue, smoky background,
+and tried in vain to grasp the secret of its fleeting, evanescent
+beauty. For beautiful Henrietta was--beautiful with a beauty quite her
+own and all the more potent because of its very indefinableness. I
+watched her as one horribly fascinated,--that high, wide white forehead,
+that weak chin, those soft, tremulous lips, on which a faint smile would
+so often play, and those great, wide eyes of blue that now looked purple
+in the lamp-light. And then, gradually, I saw, as I watched, an
+expression I had never seen there before; the wavering suggestion of the
+smile left the lips and they fell apart, loose and bloodless, with a
+glimpse of the missing front tooth. It was an expression that lasted but
+the fraction of a second, but it stamped her whole countenance with
+something sinister.
+
+Then Henrietta lifted the eggs, carried the coffee-pot across to the
+table, which was none other than the board-capped barrel, and went back
+for the lamp. All these things she insisted upon doing herself, just as
+she had stubbornly refused to allow me to help with the cooking of the
+supper.
+
+Setting the lamp down upon the improvised table, she threw open one of
+the shutters to let in a breath of fresh air, and as she did so the room
+was filled with the roar and dust of the elevated train which passed so
+close to our windows, and after it came a cold draft of air caused by
+the suction of the cars. Henrietta closed the window and returned to the
+table.
+
+Then I answered her question: "Well, that depends upon what you mean by
+gentleman-friend," I said.
+
+"I mean just what I said," replied Henrietta, sliding an egg upon her
+plate and passing the remaining one to me. "I mean a _special_
+gentleman-friend."
+
+"Well, no; I guess I haven't. I used to know lots of boys in the country
+where I lived, but there isn't one of them I could call my special
+gentleman-friend, and I don't know any men here." I uttered this speech
+carefully, so as not to imply any criticism of Henrietta's use of the
+expression "gentleman-friend," nor to call down upon my own head her
+criticism for using any other than the box-factory vernacular in
+discussing these delicate amatory affairs.
+
+"Oh, go and tell that to your grandmother!" she retorted, with a sly
+little laugh. "Don't none of the girls there have gentlemen-friends, or
+is farmers so different that they never stand gentlemen-friends to
+them?"
+
+"Oh, dear me, yes!" I answered hastily, trying to avoid the unpleasant
+_double entendre_, and choosing to accept it in its strictly explicit
+phase. "Why, certainly, the girls get married there every day. There are
+hardly any old maids in my part of the country. They get engaged almost
+as soon as they are out of short dresses, and the first thing you know,
+they are married and raising families." Then I added, "but have you got
+a gentleman-friend yourself?"
+
+"Yep," she answered, nodding and pouring out the coffee; "I have a very
+particular gentleman-friend what's been keeping company with me for
+nearly a year, off and on."
+
+"Oh!" I cried, eager to turn the conversation toward Henrietta's
+personal affairs instead of my own, which I felt she completely
+misconstrued. "Do tell me about him; what is his name--and are you
+engaged to him yet?"
+
+"My! ain't you fresh, though?" she said; but there was cordiality in the
+rebuff. "I met him at the mission where I teach Sundays," she went on.
+"He's brother Mason, and he's the Sunday-school superintendent. He give
+me all that perfume on the mantel," and she pointed a dripping knife
+toward the row of empty bottles.
+
+"Why, is he in the perfumery business?" I asked innocently, my eyes
+ranging over the heterogeneous collection on the mantel. Henrietta took
+the remark as exceedingly funny, for she immediately fell into a
+paroxysm of tittering, choking over a mouthful of food before she could
+attain gravity enough to answer.
+
+"Lord! no; you do ask the funniest questions!"
+
+Thus checked, I did not press for further information as to brother
+Mason's vocation, but proceeded to satisfy my hunger, which was not
+diminished by the unappetizing appearance of the food on the barrel.
+
+It was a matter of great surprise to me to see how little Henrietta ate,
+and I was likewise ashamed of my own voracious appetite. Henrietta
+noticed this and frowned ominously.
+
+"God! but you do eat!" she commented frankly, poising her knife in air.
+
+"I'm hungry. I've worked hard to-day," I replied with dignity.
+
+"Maybe you won't eat so much, though, after a while," she said
+hopefully.
+
+"Maybe not," I agreed. "But you, Henrietta--you are not eating
+anything!"
+
+"Me? Oh, I'm all right. I'm eating as much as I ever do. The works takes
+away my hunger. If it didn't, I don't know how I'd get along. If I eat
+as much as you, I'd be likely to starve to death. I couldn't make enough
+to feed me. When I first begun to work in the factory I'd eat three or
+four pieces of bread across the loaf, and potatoes and meat, and be
+hungry for things besides; but after a while you get used to being
+hungry for so long, you couldn't eat if you had it to eat."
+
+"How long have you been working?" I ventured.
+
+Henrietta put her cup on the table and shot a suspicious glance at me
+before she answered:
+
+"Oh, off and on, and for five or six years, ever since my uncle died. He
+was my guardian--that's his house up there."
+
+I looked in the direction of Henrietta's pointed finger to a cheap
+chromolithograph that was tacked on the wall between the windows and
+immediately over the barrel where we were eating. I recognized it at
+once as a reproduction of a familiar scene showing a castle on the
+Rhine. I had seen the same picture many times, once as a supplement with
+a Sunday newspaper. That this stately pile of green and yellow
+variegated stones should be the residence of Henrietta's uncle and
+guardian seemed obviously but a bit of girlish fun, of a piece with her
+earlier talk regarding her aristocratic ancestry; for by this time I had
+construed that strange story into a hoax that was never meant to be
+taken seriously.
+
+But one glance now at Henrietta's face showed me my mistake. It was
+plainly to be seen that she had come to believe every word of what she
+had told me.
+
+My eye had traveled to the row of garments on the pegs behind the door
+and had rested with curiosity upon a "lassie" bonnet and cloak.
+Henrietta did not wait for the question on my lips.
+
+"Them's my adjutant's uniform," she said, with a touch of pride. "You
+didn't know I used to be an adjutant in the Salvation Army, did you?"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"Well, I was, all right. Adjutant Faith Manners, that's what I was," and
+rising, she limped across the floor, and burrowing in the depths of the
+trunk, returned in a moment with an envelop which she handed me with the
+command to read its contents. The envelop, postmarked "Pittsburg, Pa.,"
+was addressed to Adjutant Faith Manners.
+
+"But how does it come you have two names?" I inquired.
+
+"Well," the girl replied slowly, "I thought as how it sounded better for
+a professing Christian to have some name like that, than Henrietta.
+Henrietta is kind of fancy-sounding, specially when you was an adjutant
+officer and was supposed to have give yourself to Jesus."
+
+I read the letter; it was a curious epistle, written in a beautiful,
+flowing hand, well worded, and complimenting Adjutant Manners upon her
+"persistence in the good work for Jesus," and winding up with the offer
+of a small post, at a salary to be determined later on, in the Pittsburg
+barracks of the Salvation Army. The name of the writer, which for
+obvious reasons it is best not to divulge, was that of an officer who, I
+have since discovered, is well and favorably known in Pittsburg. The
+whole thing was a bewildering paradox. There was no doubt of its being a
+bona-fide letter, nor of Adjutant Faith Manners and my room-mate being
+one and the same person. And yet, how explain the ludicrous
+inconsistency of such an experience in the life of such a girl?
+
+I had opened my mouth to ask some question to this end, when we started
+as a heavy step resounded in the hallway outside. Then the latch
+rattled, the door swung open, and a thick-set, burly, bearded man stood
+upon the threshold. I screamed before I noticed that Henrietta regarded
+the new-comer quite as a matter of course.
+
+The man stood in the doorway, evidently surprised for the moment at
+seeing me there; then, closing the door behind him, he advanced
+awkwardly, tiptoeing across the floor, and sat down upon the edge of the
+bed without so much as a word.
+
+"Will you have a cup of coffee, brother Mason?" asked Henrietta,
+shaking the pot to determine whether its contents would warrant the
+invitation.
+
+"I don't care if I do, sister Manners," returned brother Mason, removing
+his hat as if it were an afterthought, and drawing forth a large red
+handkerchief with which he mopped his forehead and thick red neck.
+
+"This is my lady-friend, Rose Fortune," said Henrietta as she drained
+the coffee-pot, and nodding first to the visitor, then to myself; "my
+gentleman-friend, brother Mason."
+
+Brother Mason had risen and tiptoed forward, his hands thrust into the
+bulging pockets of his overcoat, whence he proceeded gravely to draw
+forth and deposit upon the barrel-top a heterogeneous love-offering, as
+follows: two oranges; a box of mustard; a small sack of nutmegs; a box
+of ground pepper; a package of allspice; a box containing three dozen
+bouillon capsules; a bottle of the exact size and label as the
+innumerable empty vessels on the mantel; a package of tea done up in
+fancy red-and-gold paper; and, last, a large paper sack of pulverized
+coffee.
+
+Henrietta now handed a cup to the donor of these gifts, which he
+accepted meekly and carried on tiptoe back to his place on the edge of
+the bed.
+
+Brother Mason drank his coffee with a great deal of unnecessary noise,
+while Henrietta gathered up the dishes, after again rebuffing me almost
+rudely for presuming to offer my services. Thus there was nothing left
+for me to do, apparently, but to sit on the soap-box and look at brother
+Mason, who regarded me in rather sheepish fashion over the top of his
+cup.
+
+I judged him to be a good-natured man on the near side of fifty. His
+close-cropped hair was an iron-gray, and his stubby beard and mustache a
+fierce red, the ferocity of which was tempered by the mildness of
+deep-set, small blue eyes. His general appearance would, I thought, have
+been more in accord with the driver of a beer-truck than anything so
+comparatively genteel as driving a grocer's wagon--his occupation, I
+discovered, which explained the source of his offerings to Henrietta.
+Despite the burliness of brother Mason, there was that about him which
+rather encouraged confidence than aroused suspicion, although it was
+difficult to reconcile him with the superintendence of a mission
+Sunday-school. The latter incongruity had just popped into my mind when
+he broke the silence by asking in a deep guttural, and with a vigorous
+nod in my direction as he put down his empty cup:
+
+"Ha! Cat'lic?"
+
+"Oh, no," I answered, eager to break the embarrassing silence--"oh, no;
+I'm a Protestant."
+
+"Ha! But you be Irish, ben't you?"
+
+I laughed. "No; American!"
+
+"Ha! Father and mother Irish, mebbe?"
+
+"No, they were American, too; but my great-great-grandfather
+and-grandmother were Irish."
+
+"Aye, that's it! I knowed you was Irish the minute I seen them red
+cheeks, eh! sister Manners?" chuckled brother Mason in a rich brogue,
+rubbing his hands and looking across at my room-mate, who had been
+apparently oblivious to our conversation, as she washed and wiped the
+dishes out of a tin basin which I recognized as that from which we had
+washed our hands and faces after we got home from work. She now fixed
+the visitor with her periwinkle eyes, and replied severely:
+
+"I ain't got nothing to say against my lady-friend's looks, as you
+certainly know, brother Mason."
+
+Something in this answer--no doubt, a hint of smothered jealousy--made
+brother Mason throw his hand to his mouth and duck his head as he darted
+a sly look toward me. But I met the look with a serious face, and indeed
+I felt serious enough without getting myself into any imbroglio with
+this strange pair of lovers.
+
+"You're Irish, I suppose, Mr. Mason?" I asked when he had recovered his
+gravity after this mirth-provoking incident.
+
+"Me? I'm from County Wicklow, but I ain't no Cat'lic Irish. I'm a
+Methody. Cat'lic in the old country, Methody here. Got converted twenty
+years ago at one of them Moody and Sankey meetings--you've heard tell of
+Moody and Sankey, mebbe? Eh? Ha!"
+
+These latter ejaculations the Catholic apostate repeated alternately and
+with rhythmic precision as he proceeded to press tobacco into a clay
+pipe with numerous deft movements of his large red thumb, regarding me
+fixedly all the while.
+
+"Yes, yes," I repeated many times, but not until he had lighted the pipe
+and drawn a deep whiff of it did brother Mason choose to regard his
+question as answered.
+
+"Well, it was them that brought me to the mourners' bench, for fair. It
+was Moody and Sankey that did the damage; and I've got to say this much
+for them gentlemen, I've never seen the day I was sorry they did it. I'm
+the supe of a mission Sunday-school now, meself; and I've done me dirty
+best to push the gospel news along." Here he turned to Henrietta. "Be
+your lady-friend coming over to-morrow afternoon, sister Manners?"
+
+"I don't hinder her, nor nobody's, doing what they like!" answered
+Henrietta, again with that air of severity, not to say iciness, in her
+manner; and I shifted myself uncomfortably on the box as I met her
+glance of patient scorn. She had now finished her dish-washing, and
+seated herself upon the edge of the box, which brother Mason had already
+appropriated with his large, clumsy bulk.
+
+"Come now, you do care, ye know you care!" he said gruffly, as he threw
+an arm carelessly across the girl's shoulder and patted her kindly; the
+scowl immediately left her face and her head dropped upon his brawny,
+red-shirted breast and snugly settled itself there, much to my
+embarrassment. Then, between long-drawn whiffs of the rank-smelling
+pipe, brother Mason descanted upon himself and his achievements,
+religious, social, financial, and political, with no interruption save
+frequent fits of choking on the part of poor Henrietta, whom even the
+clouds of rank smoke could not drive from her position of vantage.
+
+Brother Mason, so he informed me, was not only an Irishman and a
+Methodist, but a member of Tammany Hall and a not unimportant personage
+in the warehouses of the wholesale grocers for whom he drove the
+delivery wagon, and from whom, I now haven't a doubt in the world, he
+had stolen for the benefit of his lady-love many such an offering of
+sweet perfume and savory spice as he had carried her that Easter Eve. I
+found his talk eminently entertaining, with the charm that often goes
+with the talk of an unlettered person who knows much of life and of men.
+He was densely ignorant from the schoolmaster's point of view, and
+openly confessed to an inability to write his name; but his ignorance
+was refreshing, as the ignorance of man is always refreshing when
+compared with the ignorance of woman; which fact, it has often appeared
+to me, is the strongest argument in favor of the general superiority of
+the male sex. For hidden somewhere within brother Mason's thick, bullet
+head there seemed to be that primary germ of intelligence which was
+apparently lacking in the fair head snuggled on his breast. It was
+therefore with a mingled feeling of relief and regret that, after a
+couple of hours of conversation, I saw him gently push Henrietta away
+and announce his departure,--relief from the embarrassment which this
+open love-making had caused me, and regret that I was once more to be
+left alone with Henrietta in that dark, cavernous house. It was then
+after midnight, and Henrietta suggested, as brother Mason drew on his
+overcoat, that she accompany him as far as the corner saloon, where she
+wanted to buy a quarter-pint of gin; and they went off together, leaving
+me alone.
+
+When their resounding footsteps had died away down the stairs, I picked
+up the lamp and walked about, examining the shadowy corners of the room,
+peering into the black abyss of the alcove where the unwholesome bed
+stood, and not neglecting, like the true woman I was, to look underneath
+and even to poke under it with the handle of a broom. I raised the
+windows and threw open the batten-shutters, and through the darkness
+tried to measure the distance to the street below. Not only that, but I
+also speculated upon being able to climb out upon the railroad tracks,
+should the worst come to the worst.
+
+What worst? What did I fear? I don't know. I did not exactly know then,
+and I scarcely know now. It may have been the promptings of what is
+popularly termed "woman's intuition." No more do I know why I then and
+there resolved that I should sleep with my shoes and stockings on; and
+further, if possible, I determined to keep awake through the long night
+before me.
+
+I closed the windows and returned to a further inspection of the room,
+stopping before the open trunk to examine some of the many books it
+contained. One by one I opened and examined the volumes; a few of them
+were romances of the Laura Jean Libbey school of fiction, but the
+majority were hymnals inscribed severally on the fly-leaf with the names
+"Faith Manners," "Hope Manners," "Patience Manners." Across the room the
+bottles on the mantel shone vaguely in the shadow. I carried the lamp
+over, and placing it in the little cleared-out space among them, began
+to examine the bottles with idle curiosity. "Wild Crab Apple," "Jockey
+Club," "Parma Violet," "Heliotrope," I read on the dainty labels,
+lifting out the ground-glass corks and smelling the lingering fragrance
+which yet attached to each empty vial. Of these there must have been two
+dozen or more.
+
+And there were other bottles, also empty, but not perfume-bottles. Of
+these others there were more than a dozen. At first I did not quite
+comprehend the purport of the printing on their labels, and it was not
+until I had studied some half a dozen of them that the sickening horror
+of their meaning dawned upon me fully. There was no mistaking them; the
+language was too unblushingly plain. They were the infamous nostrums of
+the malpractitioner; and in the light of this loathsome revelation there
+was but one thing for me to do: I had to get out of that room, and
+before Henrietta should return; and so, grabbing up my hat and jacket, I
+rushed in a panic out of the awful place into the midnight blackness of
+the empty street.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+IN WHICH I FIND MYSELF A HOMELESS WANDERER IN THE NIGHT
+
+
+In making my escape I had not counted upon my chances of meeting
+Henrietta returning from the saloon. I had thought of nothing but to get
+as far away as possible from the horror of it all. Dashing headlong down
+the street, I was going I knew not where, when suddenly Henrietta's
+vacuous "tee-hee" rang out in the darkness and echoed among the iron
+girders of the elevated trestle; and, looking ahead of me, I saw her in
+the light of the corner gas-jet coming toward me, a man on either side
+of her, and all three evidently in the best of spirits. I sank back into
+the darkness of a doorway that stood open, motionless until they had
+passed and their voices had died away.
+
+In the few minutes of waiting, I had collected my wits sufficiently to
+determine upon a plan of action. I would find my way back to the
+Jefferson Market, and stay there until daylight, and then go to the
+Working Girls' Home recommended by the police matron.
+
+But no sooner had I determined on this plan, which was really the only
+thing I could have done, than I heard women's voices close at hand; and
+before I could creep out of the doorway, two figures, groping up to it
+through the darkness, dropped down upon the threshold. They muttered and
+mumbled to each other for a little while, then their deep breathing told
+me they had fallen into a doze.
+
+Again and again I had crept out of my hiding-place, looked at the two
+bowed, crouching figures, which I could see only in vague outline, and
+then withdrew again into the comparative safety of the black hallway. I
+hesitated to waken them, and I could not creep over them asleep--not
+until I heard the low, guttural voice of a drunken man in the darkness
+above, and the uncertain shuffle of feet feeling their way to the head
+of the staircase. Then, my heart in my mouth, quite as much for the fear
+of what was before me as for what was fumbling about in the darkness
+behind, I came boldly out and stood over the huddled figures. Now I saw
+that they were old women, very old, and both fast asleep, with their
+arms locked about each other for protection against the cold. Both were
+bare-headed and scantily dressed, and each wore a little wisp of gray
+hair drawn into a button at the back of her head, just as Mrs. Pringle
+had worn hers. I touched the nearest bundle on the shoulder. She awoke
+with a start, and peered around at me with a pitiful whimper. I
+explained that I only wanted to pass, and that she would oblige me very
+much to allow me to do so.
+
+"You want to git out, do ye, dearie? Well, you jist shall git out," came
+the rejoinder in a high, quavering voice, and slowly the old woman
+lifted herself, with many groans and "ouches" for her stiffened joints.
+
+"Dearie! dearie! I thought ye wuz the cop," the old crone went on, as
+she grasped my arm in a hand whose thinness I could feel through my thin
+jacket. "A nice arm it is ye have got, and yit ye don't speak as if ye
+be one of we uns, be you?" The withered hand held me as though in a
+vise, while I could feel the gin-laden breath of the unfortunate
+creature as she peered close into my face.
+
+"Please--please let me go!" I whispered, for I could hear the stumbling
+footsteps within near the bottom of the stairs. "Please let me go! I
+must go to the drug-store to find a doctor; some one is sick."
+
+"Sure, dearie, sure!" and the thin fingers relaxed their hold. "Do ye
+know where the drug-store is? and mightn't I make bold enough to ask to
+go with ye? It's late for a lady to be out, with the streets full of
+drunks and lazy longshoremen; and I know you _be_ a lady."
+
+I was in a quandary. Naturally I did not want to accept this drunken
+woman's offer to pilot me, and yet I really had not the heart to offend
+the old creature, for there was genuine sympathy betrayed in her voice
+at the mention of sickness. She seemed to take my silence for
+acceptance, however; and placing her arm on mine, conducted me down the
+dark street. At the corner we passed under a gas-lamp, when we saw each
+other distinctly for the first time. She was dark and swarthy, with
+deep-set black eyes, and her thin, coarse, bristling gray hair, I
+noticed, was full of wisps of excelsior and grass box-packing. She was
+about sixty-two or-three, and had a spare, brawny frame with heavy,
+stooped shoulders. Evidently she had taken just as careful an inventory
+of my appearance, for we had not gone far before she was giving me all
+manner of good advice about taking care of myself in a big, wicked city,
+with repeated asseverations that she always knew a lady when she saw
+one, and that if I wasn't one of that enviable species, then her name
+wasn't Mrs. Bridget Reynolds; and the latter being "a proper married
+woman and the mother of a family all dead now, God rest their souls!"
+who should know a lady better than she? And why was Mrs. Bridget
+Reynolds, a proper married and equally proper widowed woman of her
+reverend years, sitting upon a doorstep at three o'clock of a cold March
+morning? Och! God bless ye, just a little trouble with the landlord, no
+work for several weeks, and a recent eviction; a small matter that had
+often happened before, and was like as not to happen ag'in, God willing!
+And who was Mrs. Bridget Reynolds's sleeping mate left behind on the
+doorstep? Divil a bit did Mrs. Bridget Reynolds know about her, only
+that she had found her that night in the empty warehouse, where she had
+gone like herself to sleep, among the packing-cases, under the straw and
+excelsior, which made a bed fit for a queen, and where they might still
+have been taking their ease had not a heartless cop chased them out, bad
+luck to him!
+
+Such was the gist of Mrs. Reynolds's discourse. I have not the courage
+to attempt to transcribe her rich brogue and picturesque phraseology;
+and even were I able to do so, it could give the reader no adequate idea
+of the wealth of optimism and cheerfulness that throbbed in her
+quavering voice. Hers could be a violent tongue, too, as the several
+men who accosted us on our dark way discovered at their first approach
+to familiarity; and on one occasion, when a drunken sailor leered up to
+my side, Mrs. Bridget spat at him like an angry tabby-cat. Somehow, I no
+longer felt afraid under her protection and guidance.
+
+At last, after a very long walk, we came in sight of the brightly
+lighted windows of a drug-store, and Mrs. Reynolds said we were on
+Bleecker Street. I had now to explain that my asking the way to a
+drug-store had been merely a bit of subterfuge, which I did in fear and
+trembling as to how Mrs. Reynolds would accept such deception on my
+part. But she was all good humor.
+
+"Sure, dearie, it's all right! I'm glad to do a good turn for yez, being
+as you're a poor body like mesilf, even if ye air a lady!"
+
+We were now standing in the glare of the big colored-glass carboys in
+the drug-store window at the corner of Bleecker Street and some one of
+its intersecting alleys. It was now four in the morning, and the streets
+were almost deserted. My companion smiled at me with the maudlin
+tenderness which gin inspires in the breast of an old Irishwoman, and as
+we stood irresolute on the corner I noticed how thinly clad she was.
+The sharp wind wrapped her calico skirt about her stiffened limbs, and
+her only wrap was a little black knitted fascinator which did not meet
+over the torn calico blouse.
+
+"A wee nip of gin would go right to the spot now, wouldn't it, dearie?"
+the old soul asked wistfully, which reminded me of something I had
+forgotten: that I still had my precious dollar and a half snugly stowed
+away in my petticoat pocket. So I suggested that we go to a lunch-room
+and have a good meal and a cup of hot coffee, and sit there till
+daylight, which now was not far off.
+
+The prospect of something to eat and something hot to drink infused
+great cheerfulness into my strange chaperon; she grasped my arm with the
+gaiety of a school-girl, and we walked eastward until we came to a dairy
+lunch-room upon the great plate-glass windows of which was enameled in
+white letters a generous bill of fare at startlingly low prices. The
+place was of the sort where everybody acts as his own waiter, buying
+checks for whatever he wants from the cashier and presenting them at a
+long counter piled up with eatables. Mrs. Reynolds was modesty itself in
+accepting of my bounty.
+
+When we had finished it was daylight, and I parted from my duenna at the
+door, she with innumerable terms of maudlin endearment, and an
+invocation to all the saints in the calendar that they should keep a
+kindly eye upon me. As to my own feelings, I felt heartless to be
+obliged to leave the poor creature with nothing more than a
+twenty-five-cent piece, and with no proffer of future help--if, indeed,
+she was not beyond help. But I was powerless; for I was as poor as she
+was. I had suggested her applying to the authorities for aid, but she
+had received it scornfully, even indignantly, declaring that Mrs.
+Bridget Reynolds would die and rot before she'd be beholden to anybody
+for charity. Anything in the shape of organized authority was her
+constitutional enemy, and the policeman was her hereditary foe.
+Hospitals were nefarious places where the doctors poisoned you and the
+nurses neglected you in order that you should die and furnish one more
+cadaver to the dissecting-rooms; almshouses were the last resort of the
+broken in heart and spirit, institutions where unspeakable crimes were
+perpetrated upon the old and helpless. Therefore, was it any wonder this
+independent old dame of Erin preferred deserted warehouses and dark
+doorways as shelter?
+
+And so, early in this Easter morning, I left Mrs. Bridget Reynolds at
+the door of the Bleecker Street lunch-room, she to go her way and I to
+go mine. I looked back when I had got half a block away, and she was
+still standing there, apparently undetermined which way to turn. I
+watched a moment, and presently she ambled across the street and rattled
+the door of the "ladies'" entrance to the saloon on the corner. Then I
+turned my face toward the reddening east, against which the shabby
+housetops and the chimneys and the distant spires and smokestacks
+stretched out in a broken, black sky-line. I was going to find the home
+for working girls which the good matron at Jefferson Market had
+recommended, and the address of which I still had in the bottom of my
+purse.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+I BECOME AN "INMATE" OF A HOME FOR WORKING GIRLS
+
+
+The spirit of the early Easter Day had breathed everywhere its own
+ineffable Sabbath peace, and when at last I emerged into Broadway, it
+was to find that familiar thoroughfare strangely transformed. On the six
+days preceding choked with traffic and humming with ten thousand noises,
+it was now silent and deserted as a country lane--silent but for the
+echo of my own footsteps upon the polished stone flagging, and deserted
+but for the myriad reflections of my own disheveled self which the great
+plate-glass windows on either side of the street flashed back at me.
+
+My way lay northward, with the spire of Grace Church as a finger-post.
+Grace Church had become a familiar landmark in the preceding weeks, so
+often had I walked past it in my hopeless quest, and now I approached it
+as one does a friend seen suddenly in a crowd of strangers. The fact
+that I was approaching an acquaintance, albeit a dumb and unseeing one,
+now made me for the first time conscious of my personal appearance so
+persistently reflected by the shop windows. Before one of them I stopped
+and surveyed myself. Truly I was a sorry-looking object. I had not been
+well washed or combed since the last morning at Mrs. Pringle's house;
+for two days I had combed my long and rather heavy hair with one of the
+small side-combs I wore, and on neither morning had I enjoyed the luxury
+of soap. And two successive mornings without soap and the services of a
+stout comb are likely to work all sorts of demoralizing transformations
+in the appearance of even a lady of leisure, to say nothing of a girl
+who had worked hard all day in a dirty factory.
+
+Fortunately the street was deserted. I stepped into the entrance of a
+big, red-sandstone building, and standing between the show-windows, took
+off my hat, laid it on the pavement, and proceeded to unroll my hair and
+slick it up once more with the aid of the side-comb, of which I had now
+only one left, having lost the other somewhere in my flight from
+Henrietta's. That I should have thought to put on my hat in preparing
+for that flight I do not understand, for I forgot my gloves, a
+brand-new pair too; my handkerchief; and, most needful of all else, my
+ribbon stock-collar, without which my neck rose horribly long and thin
+above my dusty jacket-collar. Looking at it ruefully, I began to feel
+for the first time what was for me at least the very quintessence of
+poverty--the absolute impossibility of personal cleanliness and of
+decent raiment. I had known hunger and loneliness since I had come to
+New York, but never before had I experienced this new, this infinitely
+greater terror--lack of self-respect. That I had done nothing to lower
+my self-respect had nothing whatever to do with it, since self-respect
+is often more a matter of material things than of moral values. It is
+possible for a hungry woman to walk with pride, and it is possible for
+the immoral and utterly degraded woman to hold her own with the best of
+her sisters, when it comes to visible manifestation of self-respect, if
+only she is able to maintain her usual degree of cleanliness and good
+grooming. But unacquainted with soap for two days! and without a collar!
+How could I ever summon courage to present myself to anybody in such a
+condition? Had I been an old woman, I mightn't have cared. But I was a
+girl; and, being a girl, I suffered all of a girl's heartache and
+melancholy wretchedness when I remembered that it was Sunday and that
+there was no hope of buying either collar or comb for twenty-four
+hours--if, indeed, I dared to spend any of my few remaining dimes and
+nickels for these necessities, which had suddenly soared to the heights
+of unattainable luxuries.
+
+In the full consciousness of my disreputable appearance, I hung in the
+doorway, reluctant to fare forth in the cruel light of the thoroughfare.
+Hitherto I had had the street all to myself, so it had not mattered so
+much how I looked. But now an empty car hurtled by, its gong breaking
+for the first time the silence of the long vista stretching away and
+dipping southward to the Battery. Then another car came speeding along
+from the opposite direction, whirled past Grace Church, and northward
+around the curve at Fourteenth Street; and following in the wake of the
+car, a hansom-cab with a jaded man and woman locked in each other's arms
+and fast asleep. As the latter passed close to the curb, I drew into the
+embrasure of the door as far as possible so as to avoid being seen by
+the cabman--as if it made the least difference whether he saw me or not;
+but such is the all-absorbing self-consciousness and vanity of girlhood.
+It was then that I noticed for the first time the glaring sign that had
+been staring at me during all these ineffectual attempts to "primp."
+
+"Wanted--Girls to learn flower-making. Paid while learning. Apply Monday
+morning at nine o'clock."
+
+I repeated the street-number over and over, so as to make sure of
+remembering it; and then, screwing up my courage, walked hurriedly up
+the street, trying to ignore the glances which were cast at me by
+occasional pedestrians. I happened to think of a large dairy lunch-room
+on Fourteenth Street where I had several times gone for coffee and
+rolls, and where the cashier and waitresses knew me by sight, and where
+I thought, by investing in a cup of coffee, I might tidy up a bit in the
+toilet-room. If only the place should be open on Sunday morning!
+
+And it was. The cashier had just stepped into her cage-like desk, and
+the waitresses were lined up in their immaculate white aprons and lace
+head-dresses. I was their first customer, apparently. The cashier, a
+pretty, amiable girl, suppressed any surprise she may have felt at my
+appearance, and greeted me with the same dazzling smile with which she
+greeted every familiar face. I explained to her what I wanted to do,
+apologizing for my slovenliness. She was all sympathetic attention, her
+eyes snapped with good-humored interest, and she told me to go back and
+take all the time I wanted to wash up. In a few minutes she sent me, by
+one of the waitresses, a fresh piece of soap, a comb, a bit of
+pumice-stone, a whisk-broom, a nail-file, a pair of curved
+nail-scissors, a tiny paper parcel containing some face-powder, and,
+wonder of wonders, a beautifully clean, fresh, shining collar!
+
+Before the big, shimmering mirrors I washed and splashed to my heart's
+content and to the infinite advantage of my visage. How delicious it was
+to see and hear and feel the clear, hot water as it rushed from the
+silver faucet into the white porcelain bowl! I washed and I washed, I
+combed and I combed, until there was absolutely no more excuse for doing
+either; then I powdered my face, just enough to take the shine off,
+filed my finger-nails, brushed my clothing, put on my borrowed collar,
+and stepped out into the eating-room, feeling, if not looking, like the
+"perfect lady" which the generous-hearted cashier declared I resembled
+"as large as life."
+
+"Never mind about the collar; you can just keep it," she said when I
+returned her toilet articles. "It's not worth but a few cents, anyway,
+and I've got plenty more of them.... Don't mention it at all; you're
+perfectly welcome. I didn't do anything more for you than I'd expect
+you to do for me if I was in such a pickle. If we working girls don't
+stand up and help one another, I'd like to know who's going to do it for
+us.... So long!"
+
+"So long!" It was not the first time that I had heard a working girl
+deliver herself of that laconic form of adieu, and heretofore I had
+always execrated it as hopelessly vulgar and silly, which no doubt it
+was and is. But from the lips of that kind-hearted woman it fell upon my
+ears with a sort of lingering sweetness. It was redolent of hope and
+good cheer.
+
+The home for working girls I found, not very far away from this
+lunch-room, in one of the streets south of Fourteenth Street and well
+over on the East Side. It was a shabby, respectable, unfriendly-looking
+building of red brick, with a narrow, black-painted arched door. On the
+cross-section of the center panel was screwed a silver plate, with the
+name of the institution inscribed in black letters, which gave to the
+door the gruesome suggestion of a coffin set on end.
+
+A polite pull at the rusty handle of the bell-cord brought no response,
+and I rang again, a little louder. A chain was rattled and a bolt drawn
+back. The lid of the black coffin flew open, disclosing, with the
+suddenness of a jack-in-the-box, a withered old beldam with a large
+brass key clutched in a hand that trembled violently with palsy.
+
+She grumbled inarticulately, and with a jerk of her head motioned me
+into a small room opening off the hall, while she closed and locked the
+door with the great brass key.
+
+The little reception-room, or office, was no more cheerful than the
+front door, and, like it, partook somewhat of an ecclesiastical aspect.
+Arranged in a sort of frieze about the room were a series of framed
+scriptural texts, all of which served to remind one in no ambiguous
+terms of the wrath of God toward the froward-hearted and of the eternal
+punishment that awaits unrepentant sinners. And then, at intervals, the
+vindictive utterances were broken by pictures--these, too, of a
+religious or pseudo-religious nature.
+
+One of these pictures particularly attracted my attention. It was
+entitled "Hope leaning upon Faith," and showed an exceedingly
+sentimental young girl leaning heavily upon an anchor, her eyes lifted
+heavenward, where the sun was just breaking through black clouds, and
+all against a perspective of angry sea. I was trying to apply its
+symbolism to my own case, when a sharp, metallic voice inquired
+abruptly:
+
+"What did you wish?"
+
+I turned about quickly. A tall, hard-faced woman of forty or thereabouts
+stood in the door, and looked at me coldly through spectacles that
+hooked behind ears the natural prominence of which was enhanced by her
+grayish hair being drawn up tightly and rolled into a "bun" on the very
+top of the head. She was the personification of neatness, if such be the
+word to characterize the prim stiffness of a flat-figured, elderly
+spinster. She wore large, square-toed, common-sense shoes, with low
+heels capped with rubber cushions, which, as I was shortly to discover,
+had earned for the lady the sobriquet of "Old Gum Heels." What her real
+name was I never found out. Nobody knew. She was the most hated of all
+our tormentors; and in all of the weeks I was to remain in the house
+over which she was one of the supervisors, I never heard her referred to
+by any other than the very disrespectful cognomen already quoted. But I
+am anticipating.
+
+"I would like to get board here," I replied timidly, for the very manner
+of the woman had in it an acid-like quality which bit and burned the
+sensibilities like vitriol does the flesh.
+
+"Have you any money?"
+
+"Not very much."
+
+"How much?" she demanded.
+
+"About one dollar."
+
+"What baggage have you?"
+
+"None," I replied, and related as well as my embarrassment would allow
+me the story of the fire and of my flight from Henrietta, not forgetting
+the generosity of the cashier in the dairy lunch-room. She listened in
+silence, and when I had finished I thought I saw the repression of a
+smile, which may or may not have been of the sardonic order. Then she
+motioned me to follow her through the long, gloomy hall to the rear of
+the house, where, turning an angle, we came to a staircase down which a
+flood of sunlight streamed from the big window on the landing. The
+sunlight showed walls of shimmering whitewashed purity and unpainted
+oaken stairs scoured white as a bone. "Old Gum Heels" stopped here, and
+was beginning to give me directions for finding the matron's room on the
+floor above, when a door at the back opened and a very little girl
+appeared with a very large pitcher of hot water, which she held tight in
+her arms as though it were a doll, jiggling at every step a little of
+the contents upon the floor.
+
+"Julia, take this girl along with you to Mrs. Pitbladder's room, and
+tell her that she wishes to make arrangements about board and lodging."
+And then to me: "Mrs. Pitbladder is the matron. You will pay your money
+to her, and she will tell you the rules and regulations for
+inmates.--And then, Julia, hurry back to the kitchen; I'll need you
+right away."
+
+"Yes, ma'am," replied the child, timidly, with a shy glance at me as she
+proceeded laboriously up the stairs. At the landing she stopped to draw
+breath, putting the pitcher upon the floor and relaxing her thin little
+arms. She was such a mite of a child, hardly more than eight or nine, if
+judged from the size of the spindly, undeveloped figure. This was
+swaddled in the ugly apron of blue-checked gingham, fastened down the
+back with large bone buttons, and so long in the sleeves that the little
+hands were all but lost, and so long in the skirt that only the ends of
+the small copper-toed shoes showed beneath. Judged, however, by the
+close-cropped head and the little sallow face that surmounted the
+aproned figure, she might have been a woman of twenty-five, so maturely
+developed was the one, so shrewd and knowing the other. The child leaned
+her shoulders upon the whitewashed wall and stared at me in bold, though
+not unfriendly curiosity, which, undoubtedly, I reciprocated. She was
+evidently sizing me up. I smiled, and she screwed her full, sensitive
+mouth into a judicial expression, puckering her forehead; then, in a
+deep, contralto voice, she spoke. What she said I didn't hear, or rather
+didn't grasp, in my wonder at the quality and timbre of that great
+voice, which, issuing from the folds of the checked apron, seemed fairly
+to fill the big hall below and the stair-well above with a deep,
+beautiful sound. I apologized and asked her to repeat what she had said.
+
+"Your skirt--it's so stylish," she said, and the little hand stole out
+and began stroking the snugly-fitting serge of that very unpretentious
+garment.
+
+"I'm very glad you like it," I laughed, "for it's the only skirt I
+have"; and I picked up the heavy pitcher and carried it up the rest of
+the way, the child following me, holding up her apron skirts with both
+hands to keep from stumbling, and making a ringing, metallic noise as
+the copper toes struck the wood at every rise. She took the pitcher at
+the head of the stairs without comment, but with a look full of
+diffident gratitude. Stopping before one of the doors, the child rapped
+timidly--so timidly, in fact, that it could scarcely be heard. No answer
+coming, she rapped again, this time a little louder, and a woman's
+shrill voice screamed, "Come in!"
+
+"Mis' Pitbladder, the lady down-stairs says as this is a young girl
+what wants to have a talk with youse about coming here," my little guide
+announced all in one breath, and almost before the door had entirely
+swung open upon the group within, consisting of an old lady and two
+little girls. The old lady was in a comfortable state of dishabille; the
+little girls each wore big checked gingham aprons like Julia's, and
+buttoned down the back with the same big, white bone buttons. One of
+them was waving Mrs. Pitbladder's hair with a crimping-iron which she
+heated in a gas-jet before the bureau; the other child was laboriously
+working at one of the pudgy hands with a pair of nail-scissors.
+
+"Come in, come in, and don't stand there with the door open," mumbled
+the bowed figure in the armchair, who held a twisted bit of uncrimped
+forelock between her teeth to keep it from getting mixed with what was
+already waved, and which fell over her face so that I could not see her
+features.
+
+"So you want to come here to board with us, my dear?" began the masked
+one, which was the signal for an exchange of grave winks between the
+hairdresser, the manicure, and the little slavey, Julia, who was pouring
+the hot water into the pitcher on the washstand.
+
+"If I could arrange it," I replied quickly, taking courage from the
+woman's kindly manner of putting the question, which was in such
+startling contrast to that of the dragon down-stairs.
+
+"You are a working girl, are you, my dear?"
+
+"I want to be. I'm looking for work now, and I hope to get a job in a
+few days. I understand your rates are very low, and that I can live here
+cheaper than almost anywhere else."
+
+"And who sent you here, my dear?"
+
+In answer to this I told her my story almost in totality, leaving out
+only such details as could not possibly have concerned her. Perfect
+candor, I was fast learning, was the only way in which one in my
+desperate situation could hope for any degree of sympathetic treatment,
+as the time for all silly pride was passed.
+
+Then Mrs. Pitbladder explained the system upon which the house was run.
+I could have a room all to myself for a dollar and a half a week, or I
+could sleep in the dormitory for ten cents a night, or fifty cents a
+week; all terms payable in advance. The latter fact she was particular
+to impress upon me. As to food, she named a price which fairly took away
+my breath. Six cents each for meals--six cents each for breakfast,
+dinner, and supper! I said at once I would become a boarder, and that I
+would take a cot in the dormitory, for which I would pay from night to
+night.
+
+At this juncture the girl who answered to the name of May finished
+undulating the last strand of gray hair, and as she lifted it off her
+mistress's face that lady raised her head and we looked at each other
+for the first time. She was somewhere between sixty-five and seventy,
+and very fat. Mrs. Pitbladder's face was a surprise to me, for all it
+was a round, red face--the very sort of face in which one would have
+expected good nature to repose. Its predominating features were a huge,
+beaked nose and high cheek-bones which encroached to an alarming degree
+upon the eye-sockets, wherein little dark, furtive eyes regarded me
+fixedly. It was a face which even the most unsophisticated observer
+could scarcely fail to characterize as that of a woman hardened in every
+sort of petty tyranny, a woman who, having the power to make others
+uncomfortable, found infinite pleasure in doing so, quite apart from any
+motive of selfish interest. To be sure, I did not read all this in Mrs.
+Pitbladder's face by the end of our first meeting. The supreme question
+to be settled, the only one which had for me a vital interest then, was
+how long I might still put off utter destitution in the event of my not
+finding work within the ensuing week.
+
+The terms were always in advance, Mrs. Pitbladder again repeated, as she
+entered my name and age in a long book which May brought from the dark
+mahogany desk that matched the rest of the well-made furniture in the
+spacious room. I would now pay her, she said, ten cents for the bed I
+was to sleep in that night, and my board money would be paid meal by
+meal to the woman in charge of the dining-room. I gave her a
+twenty-five-cent piece. I had remaining three other silver quarters. I
+watched my twenty-five-cent piece drop into Mrs. Pitbladder's purse, and
+heard the greedy mouth of that receptacle snap shut.
+
+"Mintie," Mrs. Pitbladder spoke briskly, "show this girl to the
+sitting-room, and then go and find Mrs. Lumley and tell her to come to
+me at once."
+
+Mintie, who had now finished lacing the matron's shoes, rose eagerly
+and, with a shy glance toward me, made for the door. I hesitated, and
+looked at Mrs. Pitbladder.
+
+"You may go now," she said, with a wave of the pudgy hand.
+
+"Excuse me," I replied, considerably abashed, quite as much by the
+curious looks of the little girls as by the annoyance of having to
+remind the matron about the fifteen cents change still due me--"excuse
+me, but I gave you twenty-five cents."
+
+"And I gave you your change, my dear," the matron returned suavely but
+decisively.
+
+"I beg your pardon for contradicting you," I replied firmly, and without
+taking my eyes from hers, which blinked unpleasantly. "You did _not_
+give me any change."
+
+"Look in your purse and see," said Mrs. Pitbladder.
+
+"It is quite unnecessary," I replied; "but I will do so to satisfy you";
+and I opened the purse again and showed my three remaining silver
+pieces, which to further satisfy her I took out upon my palm and then
+turned the purse's lining inside out.
+
+But Mrs. Pitbladder did not seem impressed. I for my part resolved to be
+equally insistent, inspired as I was with the determination that comes
+to desperate people. There were fifteen cents due me, and nobody should
+cheat me out of a single one of those precious pennies if I could
+possibly prevent it. There was a short silence in which we took each
+other's measure, the children looking on in evident enjoyment of the
+situation. Finally the old lady opened the purse again and gave me the
+change due, though she grumblingly maintained that it was I, not she,
+who was in error.
+
+When the door closed at last upon us, my small companion clutched my
+hand and gave it a jubilant squeeze. "Golly! that did me good," she
+whispered as we were going down-stairs. "She always lets on to make
+mistakes about the girls' change, only most of 'em is so scairt of her
+they just let her beat them out of it."
+
+While the child went to find Mrs. Lumley I waited in the sitting-room.
+It was an empty, ugly place, with bare floors and whitewashed walls, the
+latter decorated, like those of the office, with framed scriptural
+texts. Its furniture consisted of several long, slat-bottomed settees
+and a single large rocking-chair which, crowded with children, was
+swinging noisily over the bare boards. At our entrance the chair stopped
+rocking, and one of the children climbed out.
+
+It was Julia. She came promptly over to my side, while a half-dozen of
+the other children jumped off the benches and ran to the rocking-chair
+to squabble over the question of who should take the vacant place.
+
+"Did yez have a row?" she asked eagerly. "Say, did yez?"
+
+I evaded the question, thinking it neither advisable nor proper to
+satisfy the curiosity of the little mite. To divert her attention, I
+began questioning her about herself and her little companions--who were
+they, what were they, and how did they come to be here?
+
+"Why, don't you know?" the little one asked, looking at me in amazement.
+"We're waifs!"
+
+"Waifs! What sort of waifs?"
+
+"Why, just waifs."
+
+"But I didn't know this was an orphan-asylum," I said, looking about at
+the children sitting in rows of two and three upon the scattered
+settees.
+
+"Oh, no, ma'am. We're not orfants," the child hastened to correct me;
+"we're just waifs."
+
+"And where are your fathers and mothers, then?" I cried.
+
+"We ain't got none," Julia replied promptly, the little hand again
+stealing through the long sleeve and stroking my much-admired skirt. She
+had now snuggled down beside me upon the settee, and instinctively,
+rather than from any desire to show friendliness, I drew my arm about
+the small shoulders, which overture was interpreted as an invitation for
+the cropped head to nestle closer.
+
+"But if you haven't father or mothers, then you must be orphans," I
+reasoned,--an argument which made Julia straighten up suddenly and look
+at me in puzzled wonderment.
+
+"No, we ain't orfants, neither, exceptin' just a few that did onct have
+fathers and mothers, mebbe; but me and May Wistaria and Mintie
+Delancy--they was the girls you seen up-stairs in HER room--we never did
+have no fathers and mothers, we're just waifs, and so's them kids waifs
+too that's playing in the rocking-chair. They was all foundling-asylum
+kids."
+
+At this moment a thick-set woman in a black dress appeared in the
+doorway, which was a signal for all the little girls to make an
+onslaught upon her. They twined their arms about her large waist, they
+hung three and four upon each of her generous, kindly arms, and the
+smaller girls held on to her skirts.
+
+Thus encumbered, the good Mrs. Lumley introduced herself in an asthmatic
+voice which was scarcely more than a whisper, and in a manner as kindly
+as it was humble. Then she shoved the children back to their benches,
+and led me up-stairs to the dormitory; showing me the cot where I was to
+sleep, the lavatory where I would make my toilet in the mornings, and
+the bath-room where I had the privilege of taking a bath once a week.
+She also told me the rules of the house: first bell at six o'clock, when
+everybody in the dormitory must rise and dress; second bell at half-past
+six, when everybody must leave the dormitory, not to return until
+bedtime. As to that hour, it came at various times: for the waifs it was
+seven o'clock; for the regular lodgers, ten o'clock; and for the
+transients, from seven till twelve o'clock, at which hour the house was
+closed for the night.
+
+All this Mrs. Lumley repeated in a dreary monotone which seemed
+strangely out of keeping with the half-concealed kindliness which was
+revealed in her homely countenance. She was a working matron, a sort of
+upper servant, and had been three years in the place, which, I gradually
+gleaned from her, had been started as a home for destitute children and
+had eventually assumed the character and discharged the functions of a
+girls' lodging-house. Under what auspices the house was conducted she
+didn't know any more than did I, any more than I know to this day. There
+was a board of managers,--ladies who sometimes came to look at the
+dormitories and the bath-rooms and then went away again in their
+carriages; there was the matron, Mrs. Pitbladder, who had been there
+four or five years, she thought, but wasn't certain; there were several
+under-matrons, who acted as teachers to the children. What did the
+children study? Reading and writing and arithmetic and the Bible; and
+then, as soon as they were old enough, they were turned into the
+sewing-room, where they were taught dressmaking, or into the laundry,
+where they learned to do fine laundry-work.
+
+All this sounded just and good, and I began to alter my opinion of the
+place. I even began to think that perhaps Mrs. Pitbladder was merely
+absent-minded and a little crotchety; that she had not meant to forget
+my fifteen cents change. I did not know until several days later that
+the house did a large dressmaking and laundry business, and that their
+advertisement appeared, and does to this day appear, in all the daily
+newspapers. It was from the older girls in the dormitory, in whispered
+talks we had at night after we were in bed, that I learned this and
+innumerable other things, which my own observation during the weeks that
+followed served to confirm.
+
+To this home for working girls the waifs, the foundlings, came at all
+sorts of tender years, came from God only knows where--I could never
+find out exactly--some of them, perhaps, from city asylums, some from
+the families upon which they had been left as an encumbrance. They came
+as little children, and they went away as grown women. For them the home
+was practically a prison. Locked in here from morning till night, week
+in, week out, year after year, they were prisoners at all save certain
+stated times when they were taken abroad for a walk under charge of the
+matrons. In return for a scant education in the rudimentary branches,
+and a very generous tuition in the drudgery of the kitchen, the laundry,
+and the sewing-room, they received in all these years only their board
+and clothes and a certain nominal protection against the vices and
+corruptions of the street and the gutter from which they had been
+snatched.
+
+
+"You won't eat here?" Mrs. Lumley inquired as we were going down-stairs
+again. To which I replied with a "Yes, why not? I have arranged with
+Mrs. Pitbladder to do so."
+
+We were on the landing where the stairs turned into the ground-floor.
+She glanced apprehensively at Mrs. Pitbladder's door, into which a small
+blue-aproned figure at this moment was passing with a tray laden with
+Mrs. Pitbladder's breakfast. When it had closed again, she looked at me
+hesitatingly, as if fearful of taking me too far into her confidence.
+Then, perhaps reading a certain unconscious reassurance there, she
+replied with a brief--
+
+"I wouldn't, if I was you. You can't stand it."
+
+"But I'll have to stand it," I returned; "I'm as poor as anybody here."
+
+She shook her head. "But you couldn't work on it--you're not used to it.
+I can see that. Besides, it isn't so cheap as you think it'll be. You'd
+better go out. I wouldn't even eat here to-day. I wouldn't begin it.
+There's a little lunch-room over on Third Avenue where you can get
+enough to eat, and just as cheap as here."
+
+The woman's manner was so mysterious, and withal so very earnest, not to
+say urgent, that I felt instinctively that there was something more in
+all she said than the mere depreciation of the quality of the victuals
+she warned me against. So I was not surprised when she said slowly and
+insinuatingly, as though feeling every step of the way:
+
+"You know the misunderstanding you had this morning--about the change?"
+
+"Yes," I answered, more mystified than ever. Then, as she looked me full
+in the eyes, light dawned upon me, and I saw the old woman up-stairs in
+a character as startling as it was infamous.
+
+"Well," Mrs. Lumley said, when she saw that I understood; and with that
+she again dropped into her habitual expression of bovine stolidness. We
+parted at the foot of the stairs, she to disappear into the back of the
+house, and I to join the waifs in the unfriendly sitting-room.
+
+The afternoon I spent sitting in Union Square, whence I went at
+half-past five for a bite of supper in the dairy lunch-room where I had
+made my toilet in the morning. I had had no luncheon, feeling that I
+could not afford more than two meals a day now. I sat a long time over
+my cup of coffee and three hard rolls. I did not want to return to that
+dreary house until the lamps should be lighted and it was time to go to
+bed. The very thought of returning to sit with those forlorn waifs, in
+that cheerless whitewashed sitting-room, was appalling.
+
+I returned a few minutes before seven, just in time to hear the children
+singing the last stanza of "Beulah Land" as I passed up-stairs to the
+dormitory on the third floor. An old woman sat outside the door,
+crocheting a shawl in such light as she could get from a blue-shaded
+night-lamp that hung in the middle of the great whitewashed room within.
+She looked up from her work long enough to challenge me with a shrewd,
+impertinent look of inquiry, demanded to know if I had any lead-pencils
+about my person, and, receiving a polite negative, allowed me to pass.
+
+I was not the first arrival. In the dim light I could make out, here and
+there, a bulging surface in the row of gray-blanketed cots, while in the
+quiet I could hear the deep breathing of the sleepers. For they all
+seemed to be asleep, save one who tossed from one side to the other and
+sighed wearily. The latter was not far away from my own cot, and before
+I had finished undressing she was sitting up looking at me.
+
+"I'd give anything for a drink of water," she said softly.
+
+"Why, is there no water?" I whispered.
+
+The words were not out of my mouth before there was a thumping upon the
+floor outside, and the voice of the beldame spoke sharply:
+
+"No talking, girls!"
+
+The thirsty girl dropped back to her pillow, and I crept under the
+blanket. Later on I learned that each must have her drink of water
+before entering the dormitory, because, once there, it was an iron-clad
+rule that we should not leave until after the rising-bell had rung at
+six the next morning. I also learned, later on, that had there not been
+also an iron-clad rule against carrying lead-pencils into the
+dormitory, the snowy-white walls were like as not to be scrawled with
+obscenities during the night hours.
+
+All sorts of girls seeking a night's refuge drifted into this
+working-girls' home. Most of them were "ne'er-do-weels"; some of them
+were girls of lax morality, though very few were essentially "bad."
+When, however, they did happen to be "bad," they were very bad indeed.
+And these lead-pencil inscriptions they left behind them were the
+frightful testimony of their innate depravity.
+
+Fortunately for me, I was quite ignorant on this first night of what the
+character of the girls under the gray blankets might in all possibility
+have been, and I settled myself to go to sleep with the thought that a
+working-girls' home was not half bad, after all.
+
+A little while later there was a fresh burst of childish voices and the
+clatter of shoes on the stairs. It was the orphans marching up to bed
+singing "Happy Day!" The music stopped when they reached the dormitory
+door, which they entered silently, two by two. Their undressing was but
+the matter of a few moments, so methodical and precise was every
+movement. The small aprons and petticoats were folded across the foot of
+each cot, and, on top, the long black stockings laid neatly. Each pair
+of copper-toed shoes was placed in exactly the same spot under the foot
+of each cot, and each little body, after wriggling itself into a gray
+flannellet nightgown, dropped to its knees and bowed its head upon the
+blanket in silent prayer.
+
+After they had tucked themselves in bed a voice very near me, and which
+I recognized as Julia's, whispered:
+
+"May, are yez asleep?"
+
+"No," muttered May.
+
+"Say, is to-morrow bean day or molasses day?"
+
+"Bean," replied May; and then all was silent in the dormitory, and so
+remained save for the interruption caused by the tiptoe entrance of some
+newly arrived "transient," some homeless wanderer driven here to seek a
+night refuge.
+
+In the morning we washed and combed in a large common toilet-room. There
+were only a dozen face-bowls, and these we had to watch our chance to
+pounce upon. I waited until the rush was over, and after the orphans had
+scurried down to their breakfast I performed a more leisurely toilet.
+Two other girls were there, doing the same thing. I recognized them as
+transient lodgers, like myself, wanderers that had drifted in.
+
+Both were very young, and one, whom I had heard sigh, and who groaned
+continuously in her sleep, very, very pretty. The latter entered into
+conversation as we combed before the long, narrow glass. "Do you stay
+here all the time?" I asked. No, she had been living with her
+"lady-friend"; and that lady-friend having departed to the country for
+lack of employment until times would pick up, she was looking about for
+a boarding-house. The subject of work gave me my opportunity, and I
+asked her if she knew of a job. She shook her head. She was a
+skirt-hand; she had worked in a Broadway sweat-shop, and didn't know
+anything about any other sort of work. As we talked she finished her
+toilet, putting on as the finishing touch a great picture-hat and a
+scanty black Eton. Ready for the street, you would have little dreamed
+that she had slept in a ten-cent lodging-house. After going through a
+sort of inspection by the old woman at the entrance, during which it was
+ascertained we had not pilfered anything, we were allowed to depart.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+IN WHICH I SPEND A HAPPY FOUR WEEKS MAKING ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS
+
+
+Bright and early, after a four-cent breakfast, I was on my way to find
+the place where I had read the sign, "Flower-makers Wanted.--Paid while
+learning."
+
+It was not difficult to find, even had I not had the number so securely
+tucked away in my memory.
+
+"Flowers & Feathers," in giant gilded letters, I read a block away, as I
+dodged electric cars and motor vehicles, and threaded the maze of
+delivery wagons and vans. I had a hasty interview with the
+superintendent, a large and effusively polite man, whose plump white
+hands sparkled with gems. He put me on the freight-elevator and told the
+boy to show me to Miss Higgins. At the third floor the iron doors were
+thrown open, and I stepped into what seemed to be a great, luxuriant
+garden. The room was long and wide, and golden with April sunshine, and
+in the April breeze that blew through the half-open windows a million
+flowers fluttered and danced in the ecstacy of spring. Flowers, flowers,
+flowers everywhere; piled high on the tables, tossed in mad confusion on
+the floor, and strung in long garlands to the far end of the big room.
+
+"The lady with the black hair, sitting down there by them American
+Beauties," said the elevator-boy, waving his hand toward the rear.
+
+I passed down a narrow path between two rows of tables that looked like
+blossoming hedges. Through the green of branches and leaves flashed the
+white of shirt-waists, and among the scarlet and purple and yellow and
+blue of myriad flowers bobbed the smiling faces of girls as they looked
+up from their task long enough to inspect the passing stranger. Here
+were no harsh sounds, no rasping voices, no shrill laughter, no pounding
+of engines. Everything just as one would expect to find it in a
+flower-garden--soft voices humming like bees, and gentle merriment that
+flowed musically as a brook over stones.
+
+"The lady with the black hair" sat before a cleared space on a table
+banked on either side with big red roses. In front of her were three or
+four glasses, each containing one salmon-colored rose, fresh and
+fragrant from the hothouse.
+
+Leaning forward, with her elbows on the table and her chin in her palm,
+she was staring intently at these four splendid blooms. Then she picked
+up a half-finished muslin rose and compared them. All this I saw while I
+waited timidly for her to look up. But she did not see me. She was
+absorbed in the study of the living rose. At last I summoned courage to
+inquire if she was Miss Higgins. She started, looked up quickly, and
+nodded her head, with a smile that displayed a row of pretty teeth. Her
+manner was cordial.
+
+"Have you ever worked at flowers before?" she asked.
+
+"No."
+
+"Ever worked at feathers?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, the best I can do is to put you at blossom-making to-day, and see
+how you take to it. It's too bad, though, you don't know anything about
+feathers; for the flower season ends in a month, anyway, and then I have
+to lay off all my girls till September, unless they can make feathers
+too. Then they get jobs on the next floor. There'll be lots of work
+here, though, for a month, and we might take you back in September."
+
+The tone was so kindly, the interest so genuine, that I was prompted to
+explain my situation, assuring her I should be glad to get work even for
+four weeks. As a result, I was put on Rosenfeld's pay-roll for three and
+a half dollars per week, with half a day's extra pay for night work: the
+latter had been a necessity three or four nights every week for six
+months, and was likely to continue for two, maybe three, weeks longer.
+Besides the assurance of extra pay from this source, Miss Higgins also
+intimated, as she conducted me to one of the tables, that if I was "able
+to make good" she would raise me to four dollars at the end of the week.
+
+Soon I was "slipping up" poppies under the instruction of Bessie, a
+dreamy-eyed young Jewess. The process was simple enough, to watch the
+skilled fingers of the other girls, but it was very tedious to my
+untried hand. In awkward, self-conscious fashion I began to open out the
+crimped wads of scarlet muslin which came to us hot from the
+crimping-machine.
+
+"You mustn't smooth the creases out too much," Bessie protested; and
+with a deft touch, the right pull here, the proper flattening there, the
+muslin scrap blossomed into a fluttering corolla.
+
+"Don't get discouraged. We've all got to learn," one of the girls at
+the far end of the table called out cheerily.
+
+"Yes, and don't be afraid of making a mistake," put in my vis-à-vis, a
+pretty Italian. "We all make mistakes while we're learning; but you'll
+find this a nice place to work, and Miss Higgins is so lovely--she's
+awful nice, too, to the new girls."
+
+"Yes, indeed," added Bessie. "It isn't many years since she worked at
+the table herself. I've often heard her tell about the first day she
+went to work down at Golderberg's."
+
+"That's the worst in town," piped another; "I stayed there just two
+days. That was enough for me. Whenever the girls disagree down there,
+they step out into the hall and lick each other. First day I was there,
+one girl got two ribs broken. Her rival just walked all over her."
+
+"What did they do with the girls?"
+
+"Oh, nothing. They made it all up, and were as sweet as two
+turtle-doves, walking around the workroom with their arms around each
+other."
+
+"Well, that's what it is to work in those cheap shops," commented Annie
+Welshons, of the big blue eyes and yellow hair. "If they ever do get
+respectable girls, they won't stay long."
+
+As we worked the conversation ran easily. The talk was in good,
+up-to-date English. There was rarely a mispronounced word, or a slip in
+grammar; and there was just enough well-selected slang to make the
+dialogue bright and to stamp the chatterers as conversant with the live
+questions of the day. The topics at all times bespoke clean minds and an
+intelligent point of view.
+
+"Are you American born?" Bessie inquired by and by.
+
+The question sounded unusual, almost unnecessary, until I discovered
+that out of the eight girls in our immediate circle, only half were
+native Americans. My vis-à-vis, Therese, was a Neapolitan; Mamie, a
+Genoese; Amelia was born in Bohemia; the girl with the yellow hair was
+North German; and Nellie declared she was from County Killarney and
+mighty glad of it.
+
+"Well, I'm an American," said Bessie, tossing her head in mock scorn, as
+she cleared away a quantity of the flowers that had been meanwhile
+accumulating on the wire lines.
+
+Therese laughed. "But only by the skin of your teeth--an eleventh-hour
+arrival." Then she turned to me and whispered that Bessie was born only
+two weeks after her mother came to this country.
+
+"Better late than never," laughed Bessie, casting a backward and
+withering glance at the aliens as she moved away with her trayful of
+scarlet blossoms to the branchers' table, where another relay of workers
+twisted green leaves among the scarlet and tied them in wreaths and
+bunches.
+
+By eleven o'clock I had made two dozen poppies, which Amelia told me was
+"just grand for a beginner." I began to feel confident that I should
+hold the job, and my fingers flew. Into the glue-pot at my right hand I
+dipped my little finger, picking up at the same moment with my other
+hand a bit of paper-covered wire. On the end of the wire was a bunch of
+short yellow threads, which were touched lightly with my glue-smeared
+finger, the wire being held between the thumb and forefinger. With the
+free left hand, I caught up a fluttering corolla, touching its
+perforated center with glue; then I "slipped up" the wire about an inch,
+took up another corolla in the same way, and then drew the two to the
+"pipped" or heart end of the wire, where they now became a big red
+flower with a golden eye. A bit of dark-green rubber tubing drawn over
+the wire completed the process, the end was bent into a hook, and the
+full-blown poppy hung on the line.
+
+At a quarter past eleven a little girl wearing an immense flower-hat
+and carrying a large market-basket came and asked us for our lunch
+orders. She carried a long piece of pasteboard and wrote as the girls
+dictated. One could buy anything one wanted, Bessie explained; bread and
+butter, eggs, chops, steak, potatoes, canned goods, for which there was
+ample provision for cooking on the gas-stoves used by the rose-makers to
+heat their pincers. When the little girl was gone I learned that she was
+one of the errand-runners, and that this was her daily task.
+
+"How far does she go to market?"
+
+"Over to First Avenue."
+
+"Isn't that pretty far for a small girl to carry such a heavy load?"
+
+"Oh, she doesn't mind it. All the errand-girls are tickled to death to
+get the job. The grocers pay them ten per cent. commission on all they
+buy."
+
+It lacked but a few minutes of twelve when the child returned, panting
+under her burden.
+
+"How much did you clear to-day?" somebody asked.
+
+"Twenty-one cents," the child answered, blushing as red as the poppies.
+
+When Miss Higgins slipped her tall, light figure into her stylish jacket
+and began to pin on her hat it was always a sign that the lunch-hour had
+come. One hundred and twenty girls popped up from their hiding-places
+behind the hedges, which had grown to great height since morning. In a
+trice spaces were cleared on the tables. Cups and saucers and knives and
+forks appeared as if by magic. In that portion of the room where the
+crimping-machines stood preparations for cooking commenced. The pincers
+and tongs of the rose-makers, and the pressing-molds of the
+leaf-workers, were taken off the fires, and in their place appeared
+stew-pans and spiders, and pots and kettles. Bacon and chops sputtered,
+steak sizzled; potatoes, beans, and corn stewed merrily. What had been
+but lately a flower-garden, by magic had become a mammoth kitchen filled
+with appetizing sounds and delicious odors. White-aproned cooks scurried
+madly. It was like a school-girls' picnic. As they moved about I noticed
+how well dressed and neat were my shop-mates in their white shirt-waists
+and dark skirts. Indeed, in the country village I had come from any one
+of them would have appeared as the very embodiment of fashion.
+
+Cooked and served at last, we ate our luncheon at leisure, and with the
+luxury of snowy-white table-cloths and napkins of tissue-paper, which
+needs of the workroom were supplied in prodigal quantities.
+
+During this hour I heard a great deal about the girls and their work.
+They told me, as they told all new-comers, of the wonderful rise of Miss
+Higgins, who began as a table-worker at three and a half dollars a week,
+and was now making fifty dollars. They told me of her rise from the best
+rose-maker in New York to designer and forewoman. They dwelt on her
+kindness to everybody, discussed her pretty clothes, and wondered which
+of her beaux she was going to marry.
+
+All afternoon I "slipped up" poppies. At five Miss Higgins came to tell
+me I was "doing fine," and that I should have four dollars instead of
+three and a half. This made the work easier than ever, and my fingers
+flew happily till six o'clock. Then we cooked dinner as we did our
+luncheon, but we took only half an hour for our evening meal, so as to
+get off at half-past nine instead of ten. At night the work was harder,
+as the room became terribly hot from the gas-jets and from the stoves
+where the rose-makers heated their tools. The faces grew tired and pale,
+and the girls sang to keep themselves awake. "The Rabbi's Daughter,"
+"The City of Sighs and Tears," and "The Banquet in Misery Hall" were the
+favorite songs. A rising breeze swept up Broadway, now almost deserted,
+and rushed through the windows, setting all our blossoms fluttering.
+Outside a soft, warm spring rain began to fall on the tired, sleepy
+city.
+
+
+One week, two weeks, passed in these pleasant surroundings. I was still
+"slipping up" poppies all day long, and every evening till half-past
+nine. Then I went home to the little cot in the dormitory of the "home."
+It would seem that all the world's wife and daughters were to wear
+nothing but poppies that season. But ours was only a small portion of
+Rosenfeld's output. Violets, geraniums, forget-me-nots,
+lilies-of-the-valley, apple-blossoms, daisies, and roses of a score of
+varieties were coming to life in this big garden in greater multitudes
+even than our common poppies. Forty girls worked on roses alone. The
+rose-makers are the swells of the trade. They are the best paid, the
+most independent, and always in competitive demand during the flower
+season. Any one can learn with patience how to make other kinds of
+flowers; but the rose-maker is born, and the thoroughly experienced
+rose-maker is an artist. Her work has a distinction, a touch, a "feel,"
+as she calls it, which none but the artist can give.
+
+The star rose-maker of the shop, next to the forewoman (who was reputed
+the finest in America), was about twenty-five. Her hair was fluffy and
+brown, and her eyes big and dark blue. She was of Irish birth, and had
+been in America about fourteen years. One day I stopped at her chair and
+asked how long it took her to learn.
+
+"I'm still learning," she replied, without looking up from the tea-rose
+in her fingers. "It was seven years before I considered myself
+first-class; and though I'm at it now thirteen, I don't consider I know
+it all yet." She worked rapidly, flecking the delicate salmon-colored
+petals with her glue-finger, and pasting them daintily around the
+fast-growing rose. I watched her pinch and press and crease each frail
+petal with her hot iron instruments, and when she had put on a thick
+rubber stem and hung the finished flower on the line she looked up and
+smiled.
+
+"Want to see a rose-maker's hand?" she remarked, turning her palm up for
+my inspection. She laughed aloud at my exclamation of horror. Calloused
+and hard as a piece of tortoise-shell, ridged with innumerable
+corrugations, and hopelessly discolored, with the thumb and forefinger
+flattened like miniature spades, her right hand had long ago lost nearly
+all semblance to the other.
+
+"It is the hot irons do that," she said, drawing her pincers from the
+fire and twirling them in the air until they grew cool enough to proceed
+with the work. "We use them every minute. We crease the petals with
+them, and crinkle and vein and curl the outer edges. And we always have
+to keep them just hot enough not to scorch the thin muslin."
+
+"How many can you make a day?"
+
+"That depends on the rose. This sort--" picking up a small, cheap June
+rose--"this sort a fair worker can make a gross of a day. But I have
+made roses where five single flowers were considered a fine day's job.
+Each of those roses had one hundred and seventy-five pieces, however;
+and there were eighteen different shapes and sizes of petals; and
+besides that, every one of those pieces had to be put in its own place.
+If one piece had been wrongly applied, the whole rose would have been
+spoiled. But they don't make many of such complicated roses in this
+country. They have to import them. They haven't enough skilled workers
+to fill big orders, and it doesn't pay the manufacturers to bother with
+small orders."
+
+The girl did all the fine work of the place, and had always more waiting
+to be done than she could have accomplished with four hands instead of
+two. She had no rival to whom this surplus work could be turned over.
+The dull season had no terrors for her, nor would it have had for her
+comrades had they been equally skilled. She made from twenty-two to
+twenty-five dollars a week, all the year round, and was too busy ever to
+take a vacation. The other girls averaged nine dollars, and if they got
+eight months' work a year they considered themselves fortunate. They
+were clever and industrious, but they had not learned to make the finer
+grade of roses.
+
+The third week came and went all too quickly, and we were now entering
+on the fourth. Plainly the season was drawing to its close. The orders
+that had come pouring in from milliners and modistes all over the land
+for six months were now dwindling daily. The superintendent and the
+"boss" walked through the department every day, and we heard them talk
+about overproduction. Friday the atmosphere was tense with anxiety. The
+girls' faces were grave. Almost without exception, there were people at
+home upon whom this annual "lay-off" fell with tragic force. I have not
+talked with one of them who did not have to work, and they have always
+some one at home to care for. A few were widows with small children at
+home or in the day nursery. One can tell little, by their appearance,
+about these secret burdens. Each girl wears a mask. The neat costume,
+made with her own hands in midnight hours snatched from hard-earned
+rest, is no evidence of extravagance, or even of comfortable
+circumstances. It is only that manifestation of proper pride and
+self-respect which the best type of wage-earning woman is never without.
+If they sometimes talk happily about theaters and parties and beaux, if
+occasionally there is a brief spell of innocent hilarity in the
+workroom, it is only the inevitable and legitimate outcropping of
+healthy and wholesome animal spirits, of a vigorous hope which not even
+the hard conditions of life can crush.
+
+On Saturday morning many of the girls sat idle. "Don't work too fast, or
+you'll work yourself out of a job," one cried in jest; but the meaning
+was one of dead earnest. And as the day passed the prophecy came true to
+one after another. In the afternoon we made a feint of work by papering
+wires and opening petals for those who were still busy. The hours passed
+drearily. Miss Higgins was going over her pay-roll, checking off the
+names of the girls who could make feathers as well as flowers. All
+others were to be laid off indefinitely that night. We watched anxiously
+for the moment, which was not far off.
+
+"I hope Miss Higgins won't cry--she did last year. It breaks her up
+terribly to let us off," somebody remarked.
+
+"It's a long time to be idle--till September," I suggested to the girl
+across the work-table. She looked up in surprise.
+
+"Idle!" she exclaimed. "But we are never idle. We daren't. We get other
+jobs."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Oh, everything: waitress in a summer boarding-house, novelty goods,
+binderies, shirt-waists, stores, anything we can get."
+
+"She's coming," some one whispered. Everybody tried to look unconcerned.
+Those who had no work to claim attention looked carefully at their
+finger-nails, or found sudden necessity to adjust collars and belts.
+Miss Higgins passed along the tables, bending over the heads and
+speaking to each in a low voice. The tears were running down her cheeks.
+Those retained concealed their happiness as best they could, and spoke
+words of sympathy and encouragement to their less fortunate companions.
+The warrants were received with a stoicism that was more pathetic than
+tears. From the far end of the room I heard an unaccustomed sound, and
+turning, I saw the forewoman, who had dropped into a chair at the
+forget-me-not table, her face buried in her arms, and sobbing like a
+child. It was the signal that her cruel duty was done, that the last
+"lay-off" sentence had been pronounced, that the work for the day and
+for the "season" was over, that it had come time to say good-by.
+
+"Good-by!" The voices echoed as we trooped down-stairs to the street
+door. "Good-by! Good-by!" The lingering farewells rose faintly above the
+noises of Broadway, as we scattered at the corner. Good-by to
+Rosenfeld's--now no longer a reality, but rather a memory of idyllic
+beauty--the workroom bright with sunshine and flashing with color, with
+the faces of the workers bent over the fashioning of rose and poppy, and
+best of all, the kind hearts and the quick sympathy that blossomed there
+as luxuriantly as the flowers themselves.
+
+Good-by to my four happiest weeks in the workaday world.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+THREE "LADY-FRIENDS," AND THE ADVENTURES THAT BEFALL THEM
+
+
+Into every human experience there must come sooner or later the bitter
+consciousness that Nature is remorselessly cruel; that she laughs
+loudest when we are most miserable; that she is never so bright, never
+so beautiful as in the darkest hour of our need; that she ever makes
+mock of our agony and ever smiles serenely at our despair.
+
+Such, at least, were my feelings in those long, beautiful June days that
+followed close on the "lay-off" at Rosenfeld's.
+
+Dear little Bessie! poor unhappy Eunice! This chapter of my experiences
+is so dominated by their personalities that I shall devote a few words
+to recounting the circumstances which brought us together and sent us
+faring forth on a summer's day to seek new fortunes, three
+"lady-friends," arm in arm. I make no apology for saying
+"lady-friends." I know all the prejudices of polite society, which
+smiles at what is esteemed to be a piece of vulgar vanity characteristic
+of the working-girl world. And yet I use the term here in all
+seriousness, in all good faith; not critically, not playfully, but
+tenderly. Because in the humble world in which our comradeship was
+formed there is none other to designate the highest type of friendship,
+no other phrase to define that affection between girl and girl which is
+as the love of sisters. In the great workaday world where we toiled and
+hoped and prayed and suffered together for a brief period we were called
+"the three lady-friends" by our shop-mates, and such we were to each
+other always, and such we shall be throughout the chapter; and I know,
+if Bessie and Eunice were here to-night, looking over my shoulder as I
+write the account of that sordid little tragedy and the part they played
+in it,--I know they would clasp their rough little hands in mine and nod
+approval.
+
+Bessie had been my "learner" at Rosenfeld's. I still remember her
+exactly as I saw her that first time, a slender little figure bending
+over the work-table. Her shirt-waist was snowy-white, and fastened
+down--oh, so securely!--under the narrow leather belt; she had a wealth
+of straight blonde hair of that clear, transparent quality which, when
+heaped high on her head, looked like a mass of spun glass; her cheeks,
+which were naturally very pale, burned a deep crimson as they reflected
+the light on the poppies beneath; and after a while, when she raised her
+head, I saw that her eyes were blue, and that her profile, sharp and
+clear cut, was that of a young Jewess. I had thought her to be about
+twenty-two,--for, pretty and fresh as she was, she looked every day of
+it,--but I found out later that she was not then eighteen.
+
+We had not been long getting acquainted--that is, as well acquainted as
+was possible in a busy shop like Rosenfeld's. Indeed, it would be a
+strange, sad world--stranger and sadder than it really is--if Bessie and
+I had not sooner or later established a certain bond of intimacy.
+Sitting opposite at the same work-table, we made poppies together and
+exchanged our little stories. She had been working, since she was
+fifteen, at all sorts of odd jobs: cash-girl in a department store;
+running errands for a fashionable modiste; cashier in a dairy
+lunch-room; making picture-frames. This was her second season at
+flower-making, and she liked it better than anything she had ever tried,
+if only there was work all the year round; for she couldn't afford to
+sit idle through the long summer months--well, I should say not!--with
+eight small brothers and sisters at home, and a rather incompetent
+father, and sixteen dollars a month rent! The experiences of a score of
+shops, and the motley crew of people she had worked with in these busy
+years, Bessie in her careless, simple narrative had the power to invest
+with lifelike reality.
+
+Scarcely less interesting than all this to me was my own story to
+Bessie, which found ready sympathy in her tender heart, especially that
+part of it that had to do with the home for working girls where I was
+now living. For to Bessie, with her inborn racial love of family,
+nothing was so much to be pitied as the unfortunates who found shelter
+there. She seemed to take a certain sort of consolation for her own hard
+life in hearing the sordid details of the wretched waifs and strays that
+came wandering into the "home" at all hours of the day and night. I told
+her about the dormitory where we slept side by side in gray-blanketed
+cots, each girl's clothes folded neatly across the footboard; of the
+cross old dragon who sat outside in the brightly lighted passageway, and
+snored all night long, when she should have been attending to her
+duties,--which duties were to keep an eye on us lest we rob one another
+of the few pennies we might have under our pillows, or that we might not
+scrawl obscene verses on the whitewashed walls, in case we had succeeded
+in smuggling in a forbidden lead-pencil. For such offenses, and they
+happened only too often, we were all held equally guilty in the eyes of
+the sour, autocratic matron. As each night brought a fresh relay of
+girls to the dormitory, it was productive of a new series of episodes,
+which I related faithfully to Bessie.
+
+That is how she became interested in Eunice. The latter had come
+tiptoeing into the dormitory one night long after the other girls were
+fast asleep, and without undressing threw herself on the vacant cot next
+to mine. In the lamplight that shone from the passageway full on her
+face, I saw, as I peeped above the rough blanket, that the new-comer was
+no common type of waif and stray. There was an elusive charm in the
+glimpse of profile and in the delicate aquiline features, a certain
+suggestion of beauty, were it not for the white, drawn look that
+enveloped them like a death-mask. As I was gazing furtively at her she
+turned on her side, moaning as only a girl can moan when peace of mind
+is gone forever. Such sounds were not uncommon in the dormitory. Several
+times, waking in the night, I had listened pityingly to the same
+half-smothered lament. On this night I had fallen asleep as usual, when
+suddenly a shriek rang out, and I wakened to hear the angry accents of
+the beldam protesting against "hysterics," and the indistinct muttering
+of the girlish sleepers whose rest the stranger had so inconsiderately
+disturbed. In a few moments everything was quiet again, our old woman
+had renewed her snoring, and then the new-comer, repressing her anguish
+as best she could, slid kneeling to the floor.
+
+It was then, all sleep gone for that night, I reached out my hand and
+touched the sleeve of her black dress.
+
+From that moment we became friends. The information which she vouchsafed
+about herself was meager and not of a character to throw much light upon
+her former condition and environment. It was obvious that there had been
+a tragedy in her life, and I instinctively guessed what that tragedy
+was, although I respected the reserve she threw around her and asked no
+indiscreet questions. She was fairly well educated, had been brought up
+in a small New Jersey village, and had been a stenographer until she
+went to a telephone office to tend a switchboard. Between that job and
+her advent in the "home" was an obvious hiatus, which at times she
+vaguely referred to as a period wherein she "lost her grip on
+everything." She had no money, and her clothes were even shabbier than
+my own, and she was too discouraged even to look for work. Her cot and
+three meager meals a day, consisting of bread and tea for breakfast and
+supper, and bread and coffee and soup for dinner, she received, as did
+all the transient boarders, in return for a ten-hour-day's work in the
+"home" kitchen. After a few nights she ceased moaning, and settled
+gradually into a hopeless apathy, while over her deep gray eyes there
+grew a film of silent misery.
+
+Stirred by my fragmentary accounts of Eunice's wretchedness, the
+generous-hearted Bessie one day suggested that we take her with us to
+look for a job as soon as the anticipated "lay-off" notice came into
+effect at Rosenfeld's. And so, on the Monday morning following that
+dreaded event, Bessie met Eunice and me at the lower right-hand corner
+of Broadway and Grand Street, and together we applied for work at the
+R---- Underwear Company, which had advertised that morning for twenty
+operators.
+
+"Ever run a power Singer?" queried the foreman.
+
+"No, but we can learn. We're all quick," answered Bessie, who had
+volunteered to act as spokesman.
+
+"Yes, I guess you can learn all right, but you won't make very much at
+first. All come together?... So! Well, then, I guess you'll want to work
+in the same room," and with that he ushered us into a very inferno of
+sound, a great, yawning chaos of terrific noise. The girls, who sat in
+long rows up and down the length of the great room, did not raise their
+eyes to the new-comers, as is the rule in less strenuous workrooms.
+Every pair of eyes seemed to be held in fascination upon the flying and
+endless strip of white that raced through a pair of hands to feed itself
+into the insatiable maw of the electric sewing-machine. Every face,
+tense and stony, bespoke a superb effort to concentrate mind and body,
+and soul itself, literally upon the point of a needle. Every form was
+crouched in the effort to guide the seam through the presser-foot. And
+piled between the opposing phalanxes of set faces were billows upon
+billows of foamy white muslin and lace--the finished garments wrought by
+the so-many dozen per hour, for the so-many cents per day,--and wrought,
+too, in this terrific, nerve-racking noise.
+
+The foreman led us into the middle of the room, which was lighted by
+gas-jets that hung directly over the girls' heads, although the ends of
+the shop had bright sunshine from the windows. He seemed a good-natured,
+respectable sort of man, of about forty, and was a Jew. Bessie and me he
+placed at machines side by side, and Eunice a little farther down the
+line. Then my first lesson began. He showed me how to thread bobbin and
+needle, how to operate ruffler and tucker, and also how to turn off and
+on the electric current which operated the machinery. My first attempt
+to do the latter was productive of a shock to the nerves that could not
+have been greater if, instead of pressing the harmless little lever
+under the machine with my knee, I had accidently exploded a bomb. The
+foreman laughed good-naturedly at my fright.
+
+"You'll get used to it by and by," he shouted above the noise; "but like
+as not for a while you won't sleep very good nights--kind of nervous;
+but you'll get over that in a week or so," and he ducked his head under
+the machine to adjust the belt. Suddenly, above all the frenzied
+crashing of the machines came a sound, half scream, half cackle:
+
+"Yi! yi! my pretty one, you'll get used to it by and by; you'll get used
+to anything in this world." It was an old woman's voice, and looking
+across the table, I saw a merry-eyed, toothless old crone, who was
+grinning and nodding at me.
+
+"Hello! hello there, Miriam! what's eating you now?" shouted the
+foreman, emerging and scrambling to his feet as he turned to get Bessie
+started. But the strange old creature only grinned wider and screeched,
+"Yi! yi!" louder than ever.
+
+But I had not time, either, to look at or listen to her now, as I leaned
+over the machine and practised at running a straight seam. Ah, the skill
+of these women and girls, and of the strange creature opposite, who can
+make a living at this torturing labor! How very different, how
+infinitely harder it is, as compared with running an ordinary
+sewing-machine. The goods that my nervous fingers tried to guide ran
+every wrong way. I had no control whatever over the fearful velocity
+with which the needle danced along the seam. In utter discouragement, I
+stopped trying for a moment, and watched the girl at my right. She was a
+swarthy, thick-lipped Jewess, of the type most common in such places,
+but I looked at her with awe and admiration. In Rachel Goldberg's case
+the making of muslin, lace-trimmed corset-covers was an art rather than
+a craft. She was a remarkable operator even among scores of experts at
+the R----. Under her stubby, ill-kept hands ruffles and tucks and
+insertion bands and lace frills were wrought with a beauty and softness
+of finish, and a speed and precision of workmanship, that made her the
+wonder and envy of the shop. And with what ease she seemed to do
+it all, despite the riveted eyes and tense-drawn muscles of her
+expressionless face! Suddenly her machine stopped, she looked
+up with a loud yawn, and stretched her arms above her head. She
+acknowledged the flattery of my look with a patronizing smile and a
+"How-do-you-think-you're-going-to-like-your-job?" I answered the
+conventional question in the usual way, and remarked that she sewed as
+if she had done it for ever and ever, and as if it were no work at all.
+
+She shook her head. "Yes, I've worked a long time at it, but my shoulder
+aches as bad this morning as it did when I was a learner like you," and
+she pressed the power-lever and again bent over the tucking.
+
+At my left Bessie was also practising on running seams, and a little
+farther down we saw poor Eunice struggling at the same hopeless lesson.
+The foreman, whose name proved to be Isaacs,--"Abe" Isaacs,--brought us
+our first "lot" of work. Mine consisted of six dozen coarse muslin
+corset-covers, which were already seamed together, and which I was
+shown how to "finish" with an embroidery yoke and ruffled edging about
+the arm's-eye. There is no basting, no pinning together of pieces; all
+the work is free-hand, and must be done with infinite exactness. I must
+hold the embroidery and the finishing strips of beading on the edge of
+the muslin with an exact nicety that will insure the edges of all three
+being caught in one seam; a process difficult enough on any
+sewing-machine, under any circumstances, but doubly so when the lightest
+touch sends the three-ply fabric under the needle with an incalculable
+velocity. Result of my first hour's work: I had spoiled a dozen
+garments. Try as I would, I invariably lost all control of my materials,
+and the needle plunged right and left--everywhere, in fact, except along
+the straight and narrow way laid out for it. And, to make matters still
+worse, I was painfully conscious that my old woman vis-à-vis was
+laughing at my distress with her irritating "Yi, yi!"
+
+As I spoiled each garment I thrust it into the bottom of a green
+pasteboard box under the table, which held my allotment of work, and
+from the top of the box grabbed up a fresh piece. I glanced over my
+shoulder and saw that Bessie was doing the same thing, although what we
+were going to do with them, or how account for such wholesale
+devastation of goods, we were too perturbed to consider. At last,
+however, after repeated trials, and by guiding the seam with laborious
+care, I succeeded in completing one garment without disaster; and I had
+just started another, when--crash!--flying shuttles and spinning bobbins
+and swirling wheels came to a standstill. My sewing-machine was silent,
+as were all the others in the great workroom. Something had happened to
+the dynamo.
+
+There was a howl of disappointment.
+
+"Yi, yi!" screamed the old woman, throwing up her hands in a gesture of
+unutterable disgust; and then, catching my eye, her wrinkled old lips
+parted in a smile of friendly interest.
+
+"How many did ye bungle?" she chuckled, leaning over and looking
+furtively up and down the room, as if afraid of being caught talking to
+me. I blushed in confusion that was half fright, and she raised a
+forefinger menacingly:
+
+"Yi! yi! ye thought I didn't see ye sneaking the spoiled truck into the
+green box; but old Miriam's got sharp eyes, she has, and she likes to
+watch you young uns when you comes in first. You're not the only one.
+They all spoil lots before they learn to make a living out of it.
+There's lots like ye!" and stooping over, she drew a handful of my
+botched work out of the box and began to rip the stitching.
+
+"That's all right; I'm glad to help ye!" she protested. "And sure, if we
+don't help each other, who's a-going to help us poor devils, I'd like to
+know?"
+
+I, too, busied myself with the task of ripping, which I saw Bessie and
+Eunice were also doing; in fact, all the new-comers of the morning could
+be thus singled out. The practised hands availed themselves of the
+enforced rest by yawning and stretching their arms, and by comparing the
+earnings of the morning; for we all worked on piece-work. Rachel
+Goldberg had finished four dozen of extra-fine garments, which meant
+seventy-five cents, and it was not yet eleven o'clock. She would make at
+least one dollar and sixty cents before the day was over, provided we
+did not have any serious breakdowns. She watched the clock
+impatiently,--every minute she was idle meant a certain fraction of a
+penny lost,--and crouched sullenly over her machine for the signal.
+
+"What are you thinking about, Miriam?" a frowsy-headed girl asked,
+giving the wink to the crowd.
+
+The generous-hearted old lady looked up from the task she was helping
+me to do, and raising her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the
+gaslight, peered down the long line of girls until she placed the
+speaker.
+
+"Yi, yi! Ye want to know what I'm thinking about? Well, mebbe, Beckie
+Frankenstein, I'm thinking what a beautiful world this is, and what a
+fine time you and me has," and the strange creature broke into a laugh
+that was more terrible than a sob.
+
+"Ah, there you go again, Miriam! What's eatin' you to-day?" cried the
+foreman, as he came along to inspect the work; and seeing Miriam undoing
+my blunders, asked, "Who did that?"
+
+Before I could put in a half-frightened acknowledgment, my intercessor
+had spoken up:
+
+"And whose 'u'd them be but mine, Abe Isaacs?"--scowling at me to keep
+silence when I opened my mouth to contradict her.
+
+The foreman looked incredulous. "You, Miriam! Do you mean to tell me it
+was you spoiled all that work? What's the matter with you to-day,
+anyway? If you don't do better, I'll have to fire you."
+
+There was a good-natured tone, a kindly compassion, in Abe Isaacs's
+voice which was not in accord with the words; and when he turned and
+asked me what I had done, there was no fear in my heart. I answered by
+looking significantly at old Miriam.
+
+"I thought as much," he muttered under his breath, and passed on to
+Bessie.
+
+"Poor old Miriam, she's teched up here," one of the girls explained,
+tapping her forehead. "They say it was the old sweat-shops put her out
+of her mind, and I guess it's so, all right. My mother knows two ladies
+that was made crazy sewing pants up to Sternberg's. But that was long
+ago, when they used to treat the girls so bad. Things is ever so much
+better now, only Miriam can't get used to the improvements. She's a
+hundred years behind the times."
+
+I was still lost in admiring wonder of Rachel Goldberg's skill. I asked
+her how long it would take me to learn to do it as well. She did not
+have a chance to answer before a harsh laugh was heard and a new voice
+asserted itself.
+
+"Oh-ho! you'll never learn to work like her, and you'd better find it
+out now. I seen you running your machine, and I says to myself, 'That
+girl 'll never make her salt making underclothes.' Pants 'd be more in
+your line. To make money on muslin you've got to be born to 't."
+
+"That's no lie, either," muttered another.
+
+"You bet it ain't!" declared the expert Rachel. "My mother was working
+on shirts for a straight ten months before I was born."
+
+In half an hour we had resumed work, and at half-past twelve we stopped
+for another half-hour and ate luncheon--Bessie, Eunice, and I in a
+corner by ourselves.
+
+We held a conference, and compared notes of the morning's progress,
+which had been even more discouraging to poor Eunice than to us; for to
+her it had brought the added misfortune of a row of stitches in her
+right forefinger. We counted up our profits for the morning, and the
+aggregate earnings of the three of us did not amount to ten cents. Of
+course we would learn to do better, but it would take a long, long time,
+Bessie was firmly convinced, before we could even make enough to buy our
+lunches. It was decided that one of us should resign the job that night,
+and the other two keep at it until the delegate found something better
+for us all and had tested the new job to her satisfaction. Bessie was of
+course appointed, and the next morning Eunice and I went alone, with
+plausible excuses for the absent Bessie, for we had a certain delicacy
+about telling the real facts to so kind a foreman as "Abe."
+
+The second day we had no better luck, and the pain between the
+shoulder-blades was unceasing. All night long I had tossed on my narrow
+cot, with aching back and nerves wrought up to such a tension that the
+moment I began to doze off I was wakened by a spasmodic jerk of the
+right arm as it reached forward to grasp a visionary strip of lace. That
+evening, as we filed out at six o'clock, Bessie was waiting for us, her
+gentle face full of radiance and good news. Even the miserable Eunice
+was affected by her hopefulness.
+
+"Oh, girls, I've got something that's really good--three dollars a week
+while you're learning, and an awful nice shop; and just think,
+girls!--the hours--I never had anything like it before, and I've knocked
+around at eighteen different jobs--half-past eight to five, and--" she
+paused for breath to announce the glorious fact--"Girls, just think of
+it!--_Saturday afternoons off_, all the year round."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+IN WHICH A TRAGIC FATE OVERTAKES MY "LADY-FRIENDS"
+
+
+The next morning we met on the corner, as usual, and Bessie led us to
+our new job--led us through a world that was strange and new to both
+Eunice and me, though poor Eunice had little heart for the newness and
+the strangeness of it all. In and out, and criss-cross, we threaded our
+way through little narrow streets bordered with stately "sky-scrapers,"
+and at last turned into Maiden Lane. We walked arm in arm till we came
+to an alley which Bessie said was Gold Street. It is more of a zigzag
+even than Maiden Lane, and is flanked by dark iron-shuttered warehouses
+and factories. Wolff's, our destination, was at the head of the street,
+and in a few minutes we were sitting side by side at the work-table,
+while our new forewoman, a cross-eyed Irish girl, was showing us what to
+do and how to do it.
+
+Making jewel-and silverware-cases was now our work. In the long,
+whitewashed workroom there were thirty other girls performing the same
+task, and on each of the five floors beneath there were as many more
+girls, pasting and pressing and trimming cases that were to hold rings,
+watches and bracelets, and spoons, knives, and forks--enough to supply
+all Christendom, it seemed to me. As beginners we were given each a
+dozen spoon-boxes to cover with white leather and line with satin. It is
+light, pleasant work, and was such an improvement on the sweat-shop
+drudgery that even Eunice smiled a little after a while.
+
+"Is youse lady-friends?" the forewoman asked when, in the course of ten
+minutes, she came to inspect our progress; on receiving an affirmative
+reply, she scowled.
+
+"Fiddlesticks! If I'd knowed youse was lady-friends, I'd jist told Izzy
+he could get some other girls," and she walked off, still scowling. The
+girls about us giggled.
+
+"Why doesn't Miss Gibbs like us to be lady-friends?" asked Bessie.
+
+A young Italian answered, "Because they always git to scrappin'."
+
+We all laughed--even Eunice--at such an ending to our friendship.
+
+"We had a fearful row here yisterday," spoke up another; "and they wuz
+lady-friends--thicker than sardines, they wuz--till they got on the outs
+about a feller down on Pearl Street; a diamond-cutter he wuz, and they
+wuz both mashed on him--a Dutchman, too, he wuz, that wore ear-rings. I
+couldn't get mashed on a Dutchman, ear-rings or no ear-rings, could
+you?"
+
+"What did they do?" asked Bessie.
+
+"Do! They snapped at each other all morning over the work-table, and
+then one of them called the other a name that wuz something awful, and
+she up and spit in her face for it."
+
+"Well, I don't blame that girl for spitting in her face," interrupted a
+voice. "I don't blame her; lady-like or not lady-like, I'd have done the
+same thing. I'd spit in the President's face if I was in the White House
+and he was to call me such a name!"
+
+"And then what happened?" asked Bessie.
+
+"Oh, they just up and at each other like two cats, tumbling over a stack
+of them there white velvet necklace-cases, and bloodying up each other's
+faces something fierce; and then Miss Gibbs she called Izzy; and Izzy he
+fired them on the spot."
+
+Despite these tales of strenuous conflicts, we were happy in our work at
+Wolff's. Our shop-mates were quiet, decent-looking girls, and their
+conversation was conspicuously clean--not always a characteristic of
+their class. Miss Gibbs, despite her justifiable prejudice against
+lady-friends, proved not unkind, and we congratulated ourselves as we
+bent over our work and listened to the cheerful hum of voices.
+
+After each case was finished,--after the satin linings and interlinings
+and the tuftings had been fitted and glued into their proper places, and
+the bit of leather drawn across the padded cover,--we could raise our
+eyes for a moment and look out upon a strange, fascinating world. The
+open windows on one side of the shop looked into the polishing-room of a
+neighboring goldsmith, and on the other side into a sunshiny workroom
+filled with swirling black wheels and flying belts among which the
+workmen kept up a dialogue in a foreign tongue. The latter place was
+near enough for a good-looking young man to attempt a flirtation with
+Bessie, in such moments as he was not carefully watching what seemed to
+be a clumsy mass of wax on the end of a wooden handle. All the long
+forenoon he kept up his manoeuvers, watching his ugly bludgeon as if it
+were the very apple of his eye; carrying it to the window one moment and
+examining it under the microscope; then carrying it back to his wheel
+and beginning all over again. Late in the afternoon he came to the
+window for the hundredth time, and brandishing the bludgeon so that the
+sunshine fell directly upon it, held it aloft for us to admire the great
+glittering gem that now sparkled deep-bedded in the ugly wax.
+
+"I gif you dat if you marry me!" cried the diamond-cutter, striking a
+dramatic attitude for Bessie's benefit.
+
+Thus one, two days passed swiftly, and we had learned to make
+jewel-cases with tolerable rapidity. We had a half-hour for luncheon,
+during which Bessie, Eunice, and I went off by ourselves to the rear of
+the shop, where we ate our sandwiches in silence and gazed out upon the
+forest of masts that filled the East River lying below.
+
+On the fourth day Eunice and I ate luncheon alone. Bessie did not come
+that morning, nor send any excuse. Her absence gave me an opportunity,
+in this half-hour's respite from work, to get better acquainted with my
+silent and mysterious fellow-boarder; anything more than a most meager
+acquaintance was impossible at the place where we lived. Like the
+majority of semi-charitable institutions, the "home" was conducted on
+the theory that the only safety to morals, as well as to pocket-books,
+was espionage and isolation.
+
+"It's awful up there, isn't it?" she remarked suddenly after we had
+discussed every possible cause for Bessie's absence.
+
+"Yes, isn't it?" I replied, somewhat surprised, for this was the first
+time the girl had ever expressed any opinion about anything, so fearful
+did she seem of betraying herself.
+
+"I suppose you often wonder what brought me there that night?" she went
+on. "You've told me your story, and you don't know anything at all about
+mine. You must often wonder, though you are too considerate to ask. But
+I'm going to tell you now without asking. It was to keep me from going
+there," pointing through the window down to the river.
+
+"I'd had a lot of trouble,--oh, a terrible lot of trouble,--and it
+seemed as if there wasn't any place for me; and I walked down to the
+edge of the river up there at the end of East Fourteenth Street, and
+something stopped me just when I was ready to jump in. Why I didn't, I
+don't know," and the girl turned a stony face to the window.
+
+"Why, it was hope and renewed courage, of course!" I replied quickly.
+"Everybody gets blue spells--when one is down on one's luck."
+
+Eunice shook her head. "No, it wasn't hope. It was because I was
+afraid--it was because I'm a coward. I'm too much of a coward to live,
+and I'm too much of a coward to die. You never felt as I do. You
+couldn't. I've lost my grip on everything. Everything's gone against me,
+and it's too late now for things to change. You don't know--_you don't
+know_, you and Bessie. If you did, you'd see how useless all your
+kindness is, in trying to get me to brace up. I've tried--my God! I have
+tried to feel that there's a life before me, but I can't--I can't.
+Sometimes, maybe for a minute, I'll forget what's gone by, and then the
+next minute the memory of it all comes back with a fearful stab. There
+is something that won't let me forget."
+
+"Hush! Eunice; don't talk so loud," I whispered as her passionate voice
+rose above the hum of the other girls in a far portion of the room.
+
+"I tell you it's no use--it's no use. I've lost my grip on things, and I
+can never catch hold again. I thought, maybe, when I started out with
+you and Bessie, and got to working again, there'd be a change. But there
+isn't any difference now from--from the night I went into that dormitory
+first. Now with you it would be different. What's happened to me might,
+maybe, happen to you; but you could fight it down. There's something
+inside of you that's stronger than anything that can hurt you from the
+outside. Most girls are that way. They get hurt--and hurt bad, and they
+cry a lot at the time and are miserable and unhappy; but after a while
+they succeed in picking themselves up, and are in the end as good,
+sometimes better, than ever. They forget in a little while all about it,
+and wind up by marrying some man who is really in love with them, and
+they are as happy as if nothing had ever happened."
+
+I looked at the occupant of cot No. 11 with mingled feelings of pity and
+amazement--pity for the hopelessness of her case, now more apparent than
+ever; amazement at her keen and morbid generalizations.
+
+"How old are you, Eunice?"
+
+"Twenty-four," she replied--"oh, I know what you're going to say: that I
+have my whole life before me, and all that. But I haven't. My life is
+all behind me."
+
+
+     "'I am the Captain of my Soul,
+     I am the Master of my Fate,'"
+
+
+I quoted.
+
+"Yes, you are; but I am not," she replied simply, and turned and looked
+at me with her hopeless eyes.
+
+Poor, unfortunate Eunice! That night, as we walked home together, she
+revealed a little more about herself by telling me that she had recently
+been discharged from the hospital on "the Island." I did not need to
+inquire the nature of the illness that had left her face so white and
+drawn. Brief as my experience had been among the humble inmates of the
+"home," I had learned the expediency of not being too solicitous
+regarding the precise facts of such cases.
+
+The next day was Saturday, and still no Bessie. As we worked we
+speculated as to her absence, and decided to spend the afternoon looking
+her up. Meanwhile, although I had been managing to do my work a little
+better each day, Eunice had not been succeeding so well. Her apathy had
+been increasing daily, until she had lost any interest she might ever
+have had in trying to do her work well. On this morning the forewoman
+was obliged to give her repeated and sharp reproofs for soiling her
+materials and for dawdling over her work.
+
+"You seem to like to work," Eunice said once, breaking a long silence.
+
+"Not any better than you do, only I've got to, and I try to make the
+best of it."
+
+"Yes, you do. You like to work, and I don't, and that's the difference
+between us. And it's all the difference in the world, too. If I liked
+work for its own sake, like you do, there'd be some hope for me living
+things down."
+
+"I wonder," she whispered, again breaking a long silence--"I wonder if
+Bessie had any man after her."
+
+I looked up suddenly, perhaps indignantly, and my reply was not
+encouraging to any conjectures along this line, as Eunice saw quickly.
+
+"I'm sorry I offended you," she added hastily; "but I didn't think
+anything wrong of Bessie--you know I didn't. Only I've watched the boss
+following her around with his eyes ever since we came here to work. You
+didn't see, for you don't know as much about their devilment as I do;
+but I tell you, if anything was ever to happen that poor little girl
+through any man, I'd choke him to death with my own hands!"
+
+The satin-tufted box she was working on dropped from her fingers and
+clattered on the floor, bringing the forewoman down upon her with many
+caustic remarks. When the flurry was over I assured her that I thought
+Bessie fully capable of taking care of herself, although I had seen more
+of the manager's advances than Eunice gave me credit for observing.
+
+At last noon came, and with it our first half-holiday. With the first
+shriek of the whistle we jumped up and began folding our aprons,
+preparatory to rushing out to find Bessie.
+
+"Where does she live?" asked Eunice.
+
+I looked at her in blank amazement, for I didn't know. I had never even
+heard the name of the street. I knew it was somewhere on the East Side;
+that was all. In all our weeks of acquaintanceship no occasion had
+arisen whereby Bessie should mention where she lived. I thought of
+Rosenfeld's. Perhaps some one there might know, and we took a Broadway
+car up-town. But Miss Higgins was away on her vacation, and none of the
+girls who still remained in the flower-shop knew any more about Bessie's
+whereabouts than I did. Thus it is in the busy, workaday world. Nobody
+knows where you come from, and nobody knows where you go. Eunice
+suggested looking in the directory; but as we found forty of the same
+name, it seemed hopeless. I did happen to know, however, that her father
+had once been a cutter or tailor; and so out of the forty we selected
+all the likeliest names and began a general canvass. After five hours of
+weary search, and after climbing the stairs of more than a score of
+tenement-houses, without success, we turned at last into East Broadway,
+footsore and dusty. In this street, on the fifth floor of a baking
+tenement, we tapped at the door of Bessie's home. A little blonde woman
+answered the knock, and when we asked for Bessie she burst into sobs and
+pointed to a red placard on the door--the quarantine notice of the Board
+of Health, which we had not seen. And then Bessie's mother told us that
+four of her brood had been laid low with malignant diphtheria. The three
+younger ones were home, sick unto death, but they had yielded to the
+entreaties of the doctor and allowed him to take Bessie to Bellevue.
+Thither we hurried as fast as the trolley would take us, only to find
+the gates closed for the day. We were not relatives, we had no permits;
+and whether Bessie were dead or alive, we must wait until visiting-hours
+the next day to discover.
+
+What we found out the next day, when we filed into the superintendent's
+office with the ill-dressed horde of anxious Sunday-afternoon visitors,
+was hardly a surprise. We expected nothing but what Eunice had predicted
+from the first. Bessie had died the night before--died murmuring about
+poppies, the young doctor told us.
+
+"She's better off where she is than she'd be down at Wolff's," said
+Eunice, as we passed through the gates on to the street again. I made
+no comment, and we walked silently away from the big, ugly brick pile
+that holds such horrors for the poor. When we reached Third Avenue,
+Eunice stopped before a florist's window, and we looked in at a cluster
+of great white lilies. Neither spoke, however, and in a moment we passed
+on down Third Avenue, now brightly lighted and teeming with its usual
+gay Sunday night crowd. At last we turned into our own street, and were
+in front of the dark building we both called "home." Here Eunice caught
+my hand in hers, with a convulsive little motion, as might a child who
+was afraid of the dark. We climbed the stone steps together, and I
+pulled the bell, Eunice's grasp on my hand growing tighter and tighter.
+
+"Good-by; it's no use," she whispered suddenly, dropping my hand and
+moving away as we heard the matron fumbling at the lock; and before I
+could utter a word of protest, before I could reach forward and snatch
+her from some dread thing, I knew not what, she had disappeared among
+the shadows of the lamplit street.
+
+
+"Where's the other girl?" asked the matron.
+
+"I don't know," I replied,--nor have I since been able to find the
+faintest clue to her whereabouts, if living, or her fate, if dead. From
+that moment at the door-step when she said good-by, Eunice stepped out
+of my life as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed her
+up. Is she dead or alive? Did the unhappy girl seek self-destruction
+that June night, or was she swept into that great, black whirlpool, the
+name of which even a girl of the workaday world mentions always with
+bated breath? I do not know. I never expect to know the fate of Eunice.
+It is only in stories that such things are made clear, usually, and this
+was only an incident in real life.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+I BECOME A "SHAKER" IN A STEAM-LAUNDRY
+
+
+The next day, Monday, they buried Bessie in a big, shabby Jewish
+cemetery out on Long Island. I did not follow my comrade to the grave.
+Nor did I go to work. All that long, beautiful June day was spent in
+fruitless search for poor Eunice.
+
+This hopeless quest, begun on Monday, was continued for three days in
+the few hours that I could snatch between five o'clock, the closing-time
+at the shop, and ten o'clock, the curfew hour at the "home." On
+Wednesday the strain grew unbearable. All the associations of Wolff's
+were tinctured with memories of the dead Bessie and the lost Eunice.
+Under the counter, in the big pasteboard box, their checked-gingham
+aprons were still rolled up just as they had left them, with the
+scissors inside; and on the pine table under my eyes were their names
+and mine, scrawled in a lead-pencil by Bessie's hand, and framed with
+heavy lines. Their high stools, which were on either side of mine, had
+been given over to two new-comers, also "lady-friends," who chewed gum
+vigorously and discussed beaux and excursions to Coney Island with a
+happy vivacity that made my secret misery all the harder to bear. That
+night I went to the desk and drew my money, tucked the two aprons away
+in a bundle with my own, and said good-by to Wolff's. The sum total of
+my capital now amounted to five dollars; and with this I felt that I
+could afford to spend the remainder of the week trying to find Eunice,
+and trust to luck to get taken back at Wolff's the following Monday
+morning.
+
+After three days' systematic inquiry, I climbed the stairs to the
+dormitory late on Sunday night, no wiser than I had been a week before.
+My discouragement gave way to a thrill of joyous surprise when I
+descried a long, thin form stretched under the gray blanket of Eunice's
+cot. I sprang forward and laid an eager hand on the thin shoulder.
+
+"Gr-r-r! Don't you try gettin' fresh, Susie Jane, er I'll smash yer
+face!" snarled the angry voice of a new-comer, as she pulled the
+coverlet up to her eyes and rolled over on the other side.
+
+Monday morning I presented myself at the jewel-case factory, and asked
+Miss Gibbs to take me back. But I was already adjudged a "shiftless
+lot," not steady, and was accordingly "turned down." Then once more I
+scanned the advertising columns.
+
+"Shakers Wanted.--Apply to Foreman" was the first that caught my eye. I
+didn't know what a "shaker" was, but that did not deter me from forming
+a sudden determination to be one. The address took me into a street
+up-town--above Twenty-third Street--the exact locality I hesitate to
+give for reasons that shortly will become obvious. Here I found the
+"Pearl Laundry," a broad brick building, grim as a fortress, and
+fortified by a breastwork of laundry-wagons backed up to the curb and
+disgorging their contents of dirty clothes. Making my way as best I
+could through the jam of horses and drivers and baskets, I reached the
+narrow, unpainted pine door marked, "Employees' Entrance," and filed up
+the stairs with a crowd of other girls--all, like myself, seeking work.
+
+At the head of the stairs we filed into a mammoth steam-filled room that
+occupied an entire floor. The foreman made quick work of us. Thirty-two
+girls I counted as they stepped up to the pale-faced, stoop-shouldered
+young fellow, who addressed each one as "Sally," in a tone which,
+despite its good-natured familiarity, was none the less businesslike
+and respectful. At last it came my turn.
+
+"Hello, Sally! Ever shook?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Ever work in a laundry?"
+
+"No; but I'm very handy."
+
+"What did you work at last?"
+
+"Jewel-cases."
+
+"All right, Sally; we'll start you in at three and a half a week, and
+maybe we'll give you four dollars after you get broke in to the
+work.--Go over there, where you seen them other ladies go," he called
+after me as I moved away, and waved his hand toward a pine-board
+partition. Here, sitting on bundles of soiled linen and on hampers, my
+thirty-two predecessors were corralled, each awaiting assignment to
+duty. They were dressed, literally, "some in rags and some in tags and
+some in velvet gowns." Calico wrappers brushed against greasy satin
+skirts, and faded kimono dressing-jackets vied in filth and slovenliness
+with unbelted shirt-waists. A faded rose bobbed in one girl's head, and
+on another's locks was arranged a gorgeous fillet of pale-blue ribbon of
+the style advertised at the time in every shop-window in New York as the
+"Du Barry." The scene was a sorry burlesque on the boudoir and the
+ball-room, a grim travesty on the sordid realities of the kitchen on
+wash-day.
+
+"Did yez come in the barber's wagon?" asked a stupid Irish girl, looking
+at me curiously. I looked blank, and she repeated the question.
+
+"What does she mean?" I asked a more intelligent girl who was seated on
+a bundle in the corner.
+
+"Didn't yez come in Tony's wagon?"
+
+"No; who's Tony?"
+
+"Oh, Tony he's a barber--a Ginny barber--that goes out with a wagon when
+they run short of help, and he picks up any girls he can find and hauls
+them in. He brought three loads this morning. We thought Tony picked you
+up. Me and her," pointing to a black-browed girl who was nodding to
+sleep with her mouth wide open, "we come in the barber's wagon."
+
+The girl's face, fat, heavy, dough-colored, had become suffused with
+amiability, and giving her snoozing comrade a gentle push, she made room
+for me on the bundle beside her.
+
+"Ever worked at this job before?" she asked.
+
+"No. Have you?"
+
+She replied with a sharp laugh, and flinging back the sleeve of her
+kimono, thrust out the stump of a wrist. At my exclamation of horror,
+she grinned.
+
+"Why, that's nothing in this here business," she said. "It happens
+every wunst in a while, when you was running the mangles and was tired.
+That's the way it was with me: I was clean done out, one Saturday night,
+and I jist couldn't see no more; and first thing I know--Wo-o-ow! and
+that hand went right straight clean into the rollers. And I was jist
+tired, that's all. I didn't have nothing to drink all that day,
+excepting pop; but the boss he swore I was drunk, and he made the
+foreman swear the same thing, and so I didn't try to get no damages.
+They sent me to the horspital, and they offered me my old job back
+again; but I jist got up my spunk and says if they can't pay me some
+damages, and goes and swears I was drunk when I didn't have nothing but
+rotten pop, I says, I can up and go some place else and get my four
+dollars a week."
+
+Before I could ask what the poor creature would be able to do with only
+one hand, the foreman appeared in the door, and we trooped out at his
+heels. Down the length of the big room, through a maze of moving
+hand-trucks and tables and rattling mangles, we followed him to the
+extreme rear, where he deposited us, in groups of five and six, at the
+big tables that were ranged from wall to wall and heaped high with wet
+clothes, still twisted just as they were turned out of the
+steam-wringer. An old woman with a bent back showed me the very simple
+process of "shaking."
+
+"Jist take the corners like this,"--suiting the action to the
+word,--"and give a shake like this, and pile them on top o' one
+another--like this," and with that she turned to her own "shaking" and
+resumed gossip with her side-partner, another old woman, who was roundly
+denouncing the "trash" that was being thrust upon her as table-mates,
+and throwing out palpable insults to the "Ginnies" who stood vis-à-vis,
+and who either didn't hear or, hearing, didn't understand or care.
+
+For the first half-hour I shook napkins bearing the familiar
+legend--woven in red--of a ubiquitous dairy-lunch place, and the next
+half-hour was occupied with bed-linen bearing the mark of a famous
+hostelry. During that time I had become fairly accustomed to my new
+surroundings, and was now able to distinguish, out of the steamy
+turmoil, the general features of a place that seethed with life and
+action. All the workers were women and girls, with the exception of the
+fifteen big, black, burly negroes who operated the tubs and the wringers
+which were ranged along the rear wall on a platform that ran parallel
+with and a little behind the shakers' tables. The negroes were stripped
+to the waist of all save a thin gauze undershirt. There was something
+demoniacal in their gestures and shouts as they ran about the vats of
+boiling soap-suds, from which they transferred the clothes to the
+swirling wringers, and then dumped them at last upon the big trucks. The
+latter were pushed away by relays of girls, who strained at the heavy
+load. The contents of the trucks were dumped first on the shakers'
+tables, and when each piece was smoothed out we--the shakers--redumped
+the stacks into the truck, which was pushed on to the manglers, who
+ironed it all out in the hot rolls. So, after several other dumpings and
+redumpings, the various lots were tied and labeled.
+
+Meanwhile a sharp, incessant pain had grown out of what was in the first
+ten or fifteen minutes a tired feeling in the arms--that excruciating,
+nerve-torturing pain which comes as a result of a ceaseless muscular
+action that knows no variation or relaxation. To forget it, I began to
+watch the eight others at our particular table. There were four
+Italians, all stupid, uninteresting-looking girls, of anywhere from
+fifteen to twenty-five years old; there was a thin, narrow-chested girl,
+with delicate wrists and nicely shaped hands, who seemed far superior
+to her companions, and who might have been pretty had it not been for
+the sunken, blue-black cavity where one eye should have been; there was
+a fat woman of forty, with a stiff neck, and of a religious temperament,
+who worked in a short under-petticoat and was stolidly indifferent to
+the conversation round her; the others were the two old dames--she who
+had initiated me, and her sprightlier though not less ancient crony,
+Mrs. Mooney. Both fairly bristled with spite and vindictiveness toward
+everything in general, and us new-comers in particular, and each
+sustained her flagging energies with frequent pinches of snuff and
+chunks of coffee-cake which they drew from inexhaustible pockets. My
+attempts at conversation with these two having been met with chilling
+silence, and as Mrs. Mooney had given me several painful thrusts with
+her sharp elbow when I happened to get too close to her, I took care to
+keep a safe distance, puzzled as to wherein I might have offended, and
+lapsing into a morbid interest in the gossip flying thick and fast
+around me.
+
+The target of scandal was "the queen," a big, handsome blonde girl of
+about twenty-five, who in a different environment and properly corseted
+and gowned would have been set down unquestionably as "a voluptuous
+beauty." Here in the laundry, in stocking-feet and an unbelted black
+shirt-waist turned far in at the neck, she was merely "mushy," to use
+the adjective of her detractors. The queen owed her nickname to the
+boss, with whom she was said to "stand in," being "awful soft after
+him." She was a sort of assistant to the foreman, bossing the job when
+he was not around, and lending a hand in rush hours with true democratic
+simplicity such as only the consciousness of her prestige could warrant
+her in doing. Now she was assisting the black men load a truck, now
+helping a couple of girls push it across the floor, now helping us dump
+it on the table--laughing and joking all the while, but at the same time
+goading us on to the very limit of human endurance. She had been in the
+"Pearl" for seven years, slaved harder than any of us, and she looked as
+fresh and buoyant as if she never had known what work was. I rather
+liked the queen, despite the fact that I detected in her immediately a
+relentless task-master; everybody else seemed to like her,
+notwithstanding the malicious things they said about her.
+
+"Tired?" asked the one-eyed girl. "Yes, it's hard work, but it's steady.
+You're never out of a job if you're a steady shaker that can be relied
+on."
+
+There was cheerfulness in her tone, and both the old women stopped
+talking.
+
+"Did yez come in the barber's wagon?" Mrs. Mooney asked. On being
+assured that we had not, she proceeded to establish amicable relations
+with the one-eyed girl and me by telling us she was glad we "weren't
+Ginnies, anyway."
+
+"Whatever happened to yer eye?" inquired the other crone of my
+companion.
+
+Unresentful of the blunt inquisitiveness, the girl responded cordially
+with her little story--glad, apparently, to have a listener.
+
+"It was something I caught in the hospital when I had appendicitis three
+years ago. When I was discharged my appendicitis was well, but my eye
+had took sore. The doctor he says when he seen it, 'That eye's too far
+gone, and it's got to come out, or the poison 'll spread to the t'other
+eye, and then you won't have no eyes at all.' My mother she didn't know
+nothing about it till it was all over. She'd have carried on awful if
+she'd knowed it. But it didn't hurt a bit. I went under chloroform, and
+when I come out of it I jist thought I'd been having a long sleep in a
+big brass bedstead, with hem-stitched sheets and things like that," and
+she pointed to the hotel linen we were all shaking.
+
+"That's the way with them hospitals," said Mrs. Mooney,
+sympathetically, and proffering the heroine of the story a chunk of
+spice-cake.
+
+"You'd been better to ha' stayed at home. Poor folks don't have no
+chanst in them high-toned places."
+
+"Why don't you take off yer shoes like us, and let yer feet spread
+out?--it'll rest them," suggested Mrs. Mooney, now passing me a
+peace-offering of coffee-cake, and tightening her mouth in a grim
+determination to be civil.
+
+Indeed, the one-eyed girl's story had wrought a transformation in these
+two sullen old women. All that was human in them had been touched by the
+tale of physical suffering, and we now met on common ground--the common
+ground of brute sympathy which one animal feels for another in distress.
+
+The work was now under full blast, and every one of the hundred and
+twenty-five girls worked with frenzied energy as the avalanche of
+clothes kept falling in upon us and were sent with lightning speed
+through the different processes, from the tubs to the packers' counters.
+Nor was there any abatement of the snowy landslide--not a moment to stop
+and rest the aching arms. Just as fast as the sweating negroes could
+unload the trucks into the tubs, more trucks came rolling in from the
+elevator, and the foaming tubs swirled perpetually, swallowing up, it
+would seem, all the towels and pillow-cases and napkins in Greater New
+York. Above the orchestra of noise I distinguished a faintly familiar
+voice, which I could not place until I heard:
+
+"And it was nothing but pop I had that day--I hadn't had nothing but
+rotten old pop all day!"
+
+From the girl's argument it was hard to determine whether she was more
+grieved at not having had stronger potations than pop on that fatal
+occasion, or at the implied aspersions upon her character for sobriety.
+Looking up, I saw that she was in one of the truck-teams. She had her
+one hand and arm strained against the rear of the sodden load, which she
+was urging forward with her hip. The load happened to be for our table,
+and as we dumped it out I asked her if there wasn't anything easier she
+could do. She responded cheerily:
+
+"No. You've got to have two hands to run the mangles, and you've got to
+have two hands to shake, and you've got to have two hands to tie up, but
+you can push a truck with one hand." Which statement of the case,
+combined with the cripple's optimism, made us laugh--all except the
+one-eyed girl, espying whom, the maimed girl suddenly changed the tone
+of levity with which she treated her own misfortune, and asked in a
+lowered voice: "What's the matter with yer eye?" And the hospital
+infection tale was repeated.
+
+Could a duchess have claimed greater grace than that poor, unlettered,
+uncouth creature's delicate perception of that subtle principle of
+courtesy, which allowed her to jest over her own misfortunes, but which
+prompted a gentle hesitation in speaking to another about hers!
+
+In the excruciating agony of the hours that followed, the trucks became
+a veritable anodyne for the pains that shot through my whole body.
+Leaning over their deep sides was a welcome relief from the strained,
+monotonous position at the tables. The one-eyed girl had likewise
+discovered the anodyne, and remarked upon it once as we dived into the
+wet freight.
+
+"It's so funny how one kind of pain sort of eases up another," she said;
+"I always feel good every time I see the truck coming, though trucking's
+far harder work than shaking if you had to do it steady. I wonder why it
+is. It was the same way with my eye. When it was getting better and just
+ached a little bit, steady, all the time, I used to wish I could have
+real hard jumping toothache, just for a change."
+
+"God love ye, and it's so," fervently exclaimed Mrs. Mooney.
+
+The day was terrifically hot outdoors, and with the fearful heat that
+came up through the floor from the engine-room directly under us,
+combined with the humidity of the steam-tilled room, we were all driven
+to a state of half-dress before the noon hour arrived. The women opened
+their dresses at the neck and cast off their shoes, and the foreman
+threw his suspenders off his shoulders, while the colored washers
+paddled about on the sloppy floor in their bare black feet.
+
+"Don't any men work in this place except the foreman?" I asked Mrs.
+Mooney, who had toiled a long time in the "Pearl" and knew everything.
+
+"Love of Mary!" she exclaimed indignantly; "and d' ye think any white
+man that called hisself a white man would work in sich a place as this,
+and with naygurs?"
+
+"But we work here," I argued.
+
+"Well, we be wimmin," she declared, drawing a pinch of snuff into her
+nostrils in a manner that indicated finality.
+
+"But if it isn't good enough for a man, it isn't good enough for us,
+even if we are women!" I persisted.
+
+She looked at me half in astonishment, half in suspicion at my daring to
+question the time-honored order of things. Economics could make no
+appeal to her intelligence, and shooting a glance out of her hard old
+black eyes, she replied with a logic that permitted no gainsaying.
+
+"Love of Mary! if yez don't like yer job, ye can git out. Sure and we
+don't take on no airs around here!"
+
+At twelve the noise ceased, and a shrill whistle ushered in the
+half-hour's respite. The effect of that raucous shriek was as solemn, as
+awe-inspiring, for the first moment, as the ringing of the Angelus bell
+in a Catholic country-side. For one moment everybody stood motionless
+and mute, the women with arms akimbo on aching hips, the black washers
+with drooping, relaxed shoulders. Each tortured frame seemed to heave
+with an inaudible "Thank God!" and then we slowly scattered in all
+directions--some to the cloak-room, where the lunches were stored along
+with the wraps, some down the stairs into the street.
+
+On this day the one-eyed girl and I found a bundle of clothes large
+enough for two to sit on, and shared our lunch. For half a ham sandwich
+she gave me a piece of cold sausage, and I gave her a dill pickle for a
+greasy doughnut. The inevitable bottle of "pop" neither of us was able
+to open until the foreman came along and lent his assistance. He
+lingered a moment to talk the usual inanities that pass between a
+democratic foreman and a couple of new girls. Under his jovial exterior
+there seemed to be a vein of seriousness, amounting almost to sadness
+when one looked at his well-modeled face and his steady gray eyes. Tall
+and pale and prematurely bent, he had a certain distinction, as if he
+had been cut out for better things. His manner had lost all the easy
+familiarity of a few hours before, and he asked us in the kindest tone
+possible how we liked the work, and heartened us with the assurance that
+it wouldn't be nearly so hard in a few days, telling us to "stand
+slack-like" and see if it didn't make the pain in our backs better. By
+slack-like he meant stoop-shouldered, as everybody grows sooner or later
+in a laundry.
+
+The foreman's hygienic lecture was interrupted by the warning rumble of
+the awakening machinery, and we scurried back to our table to make
+practical test of his theory. We followed it to the letter, but, like
+every other palliative of pain, it soon lost its virtue, and the long
+afternoon was one of unspeakable agony. There were now not only aching
+backs and arms and legs, but feet parboiled to a blister on the burning
+floors. The air was rent with lamentations, and before long my
+side-partner and I had also shed our shoes. By four o'clock everybody
+had sunk into a state of apathetic quiet, and even the exuberant Queen
+lost something of her vivaciousness, and attended strictly to the
+business of goading us on to our tasks.
+
+"We're two days behind with them hospital sheets," she screamed to one
+relay; "S---- Hotel Barber Shop got to go out to-night," which
+information brought groans from Mrs. Mooney.
+
+"Mother of God!" she cried. "Sure and that means nine o'clock to-night."
+
+"Aren't we going to get out at six?" asked the one-eyed girl, while I
+glanced dismally at the never-ending train of trucks that kept rolling
+out upon the washers' platform, faster now than at any other time of the
+day.
+
+"God love ye! dearie, no," returned Mrs. Mooney. "Ye'll never get
+outside _this_ shop at six any night, unless ye're carried out dead.
+We're in luck to get out as early as eight."
+
+"Every night?"
+
+"Sure, every night exceptin' Saturday, and then it's twelve to
+half-past one."
+
+"Oh, that's not so bad if you have a half-holiday."
+
+"Half-holiday!" echoed Mrs. Mooney. "Will ye listen to that! A
+half-holiday, indeed!" Then the mocking voice grew kinder. "Sure and
+it's every minute of twelve o'clock or a half-hour into Sunday mornin'
+afore you ever see the outside of this place of a Saturday in
+summer-time, with all the washin' and ironin' for the summer hotels and
+the big bugs as is at the sea-shore."
+
+"Youse ain't got no kick coming," said one of the Ginney girls. "Youse
+gets six cents an hour overtime, and youse 'll be mighty glad to make
+that exter money!"
+
+Mrs. Mooney glared viciously at the interlopers. "Yes, and if it wasn't
+for the likes of yez Ginnies that 'll work for nothing and live in
+pig-pens, the likes of us white people wouldn't have to work nights."
+
+"Well I made ninety-six cents' overtime last week," spoke up the silent
+fat woman in the under-petticoat, "and I was thankful to the Lord to get
+it."
+
+Of the two hours or more that followed I have only a hazy recollection
+of colored men bending over the pungent foam, of straining, sweating
+women dragging their trucks round and round the great steaming-room. I
+remembered nothing whatever of the moment when the agony was ended and
+we were released for the day. Up to a certain dim borderland I remember
+that my back ached and that my feet dragged heavily over the burning
+floor, two pieces of boiling flesh. I do remember distinctly, however,
+suddenly waking up on Third Avenue as I was walking past a delicatessen
+store, and looking straight into the countenance of a pleasant-faced
+woman. I must have walked right into her, for she seemed amused, and
+went on her way laughing at something--probably my look of surprise as
+the impact brought me suddenly to full consciousness. A clock was
+hanging in the delicatessen-store window, and the hour-hand stood at
+nine. A cooling sea-breeze was blowing up from the south, and as I
+continued my walk home I realized that I had just passed out of a sort
+of trance,--a trance superinduced by physical misery,--a merciful
+subconscious condition of apathy, in which my soul as well as my body
+had taken refuge when torture grew unbearable.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+IN WHICH IT IS PROVED TO ME THAT THE DARKEST HOUR COMES JUST BEFORE THE
+DAWN
+
+
+The next morning I asked Mrs. Mooney what time it was when we left the
+laundry the evening before, and she said half-past eight. Then I
+recounted the strange experience of the trance, which did not arouse the
+interest I had expected.
+
+"That's nothing. That's the way we all get sometimes," she declared. "If
+we didn't get into them trance-spells there'd be none of us workin' here
+at all, at all."
+
+"Yes, indeed," said a prayerful voice. "Praise God, it's one of his
+blessid pervisions to help us bear our crosses."
+
+"I don't think the Lord's got much to do with our breaking backs or
+feet, do you?" asked the one-eyed girl, as we turned to unload a truck.
+"Now I'm not an unbeliever, and I believe in God and Jesus Christ, all
+right; but I sometimes think they don't do all these things that the
+Methodists and Salvation Army says they do. Somehow, I don't believe God
+knows anything about my eye or that one-armed girl's getting hurt in the
+roller. I used to believe everything I heard the evangelist say, but I
+don't think no more that religion is what it's cracked up to be." A few
+moments later she asked if I was a Protestant, too, and receiving an
+affirmative, proceeded to express herself on the superior merits of that
+form of faith as compared with the Catholic, against which she had all
+the narrow-minded ignorance and superstition which, strange to say, only
+too often characterize the better element of the class to which she
+belonged. This girl's unreasonable prejudice against something of which
+she knew not the first thing presented a paradox universal in her world.
+The Catholic Church as an institution was her enemy, and the enemy of
+all Protestants. "If they could kill you, and not be found out by the
+law, they'd do it just as quick as wink, because the priest would bail
+them out of hell for a dollar and a quarter." And yet, when it came to
+the concrete and personal, she had to admit that all the Catholics she
+had ever known were "just about as good as Protestants."
+
+This religious discussion was carried on in a low voice, with many
+side-glances toward the Catholic side of the table, as if danger
+threatened were they to hear a word of it. I knew, however, that there
+was nothing to fear from that quarter. There was only one religious
+conscience there, and that belonged to the one-eyed girl herself. From
+innumerable other instances I had met with before I had come to this
+generalization: that bigotry and bitter prejudices in matters of faith,
+deplorable as they at first seem to be, mark a distinct step in the
+social evolution and moral development of the ignorant and degraded.
+Nobody else at that table was far enough along to worry herself with
+principles of faith.
+
+"I think the Salvation Army's a kind of good religion," she continued;
+"only they--" but I heard no more; we were interrupted by a flurry of
+interest in the front, which spread quickly to our region, as a portly
+man in an automobile coat and Panama hat made his way by the
+mangle-machines and the tables. The foreman, diffident and uncertain,
+was walking by his side; and from the peremptory and numerous
+instructions he was receiving, it became patent that his companion was
+the "boss." Everybody looked hastily, stealthily, at the Queen, who hid
+her pleasure under a very transparent veil of dissembling, as she helped
+us unload a truck. Never before had I heard the queen laugh so merrily,
+and never before had I realized what a superb, handsome animal she was.
+There was a certain rhythmic movement as she raised and lowered her body
+over the truck. The excitement of the moment added a deeper color to her
+always splendid rose-and-white complexion, upon which the steam-laden
+atmosphere distilled perpetually that soft dewiness characteristic of
+the perfect complexion of young children or of goddesses. And like a
+goddess the queen appeared that moment,--an untidy, earth-chained
+goddess, mirthful, voluptuous.
+
+"She thinks she's mighty fine, don't she?" whispered my one-eyed friend.
+
+The boss halted at the truck, and the queen looked up with ill-feigned
+surprise, as if she hadn't known for five minutes that he was in the
+room. He seemed the personification of prosperous, ignorant vulgarity,
+and his manner, as he swept his eye carelessly over his queen's
+subjects, was one of good-natured insolence. He didn't tarry long, and
+if guilty of the gentle dalliance of which he was accused, it was plain
+to be seen that he did not allow it to interfere with the discipline of
+the "Pearl."
+
+At lunch-time the one-eyed girl and I went off to the same corner as
+before, and no sooner had we begun to divide our pickles and sandwiches
+than in sauntered the foreman, munching alternately from a cylinder of
+bologna sausage in one hand and a chunk of dry bread in the other.
+
+"Well, how goes it?" he asked pleasantly, dropping his long, lank frame
+upon a bundle of hotel table-linen. "Did you try my advice about
+standin' slack-like?"
+
+We replied to his question while the one-eyed girl carved a dill pickle
+and a sweet pickle each into three portions.
+
+He related how he had come to the "Pearl" six years ago, and had worked
+himself up to his present job, which was not to be sneezed at, he said,
+considering that eighteen dollars a week wasn't to be picked up every
+day--and steady work, too, no layoffs and no shut-downs. He emphasized
+the fact, evidently very important in his mind, that he wasn't married,
+that he had not met any girl yet that would have him, which my companion
+insisted couldn't possibly be true, or if it was, then none of the girls
+he had ever asked had any taste at all. He lived at home with his
+mother, whom he didn't allow to "work out" since he'd been big enough to
+earn a living for her. There was a sister, too, at home, who had a job
+in a near-by manufactory; but she was engaged, and going to be married
+in her "intended's" vacation. Then, the foreman thought, he'd have to
+get a wife himself, if he could find anybody to have him. And she
+wouldn't have to work, either--not on your tintype! She would live at
+home with his mother, and darn his socks and sew on his buttons, and
+she'd have no washing or ironing to do, as he got his all done for
+nothing in the "Pearl." That perquisite went along with the eighteen
+dollars a week. Oh, she'd have things as nice as any hard-working young
+fellow could give her.
+
+"Would she have to be purty?" asked the one-eyed girl, who seemed
+unusually interested in this hypothetical wife, and who took such a
+lively interest in the foreman and his plans that I felt my heart sink
+in pity for the poor maimed creature. Was she hanging breathless on the
+foreman's reply to this question? If so, there was a certain comfort in
+the gallant answer.
+
+"No, I should say not," he replied, as I thought with gentle
+consideration of her to whom he was speaking; "I don't think I could
+ever trust a wife who was a ten-thousand-dollar beaut'. She'd want to
+gad too much. I don't think looks count for much; and I'd think she was
+pretty, anyway, if I was terrible stuck on her. Them things don't make
+much difference only in story-papers. But there's one thing she would
+have to be, and that is handy at doing things. I wouldn't marry a lazy
+girl, and I wouldn't marry a girl that wasn't a working girl."
+
+The engines began to give out a warning rumble, and the foreman
+scrambled somewhat reluctantly to his feet, and stretching out his long
+arms, started off.
+
+"Say, that feller's clean, dead gone on you," remarked my companion,
+closing her hand over mine in a pressure that was full of congratulation
+and honest delight.
+
+I scouted the idea, but nevertheless I became suddenly conscious of a
+complete change in his manner from the easy familiarity of the morning
+before. Instead of the generic name of "Sally," or the Christian name
+which on better acquaintance he applied to the other girls, he had
+politely prefixed a "Miss" to my surname. There had come, too, a
+peculiar feeling of trust and confidence in him--a welcome sensation in
+this horrible, degraded place; and it was with gratefulness that I
+watched him disappear in the steamy vista, throwing off his suspenders
+preparatory to plunging into the turmoil of the afternoon's work now
+under way.
+
+"Sure thing he is, I'd bet my life on it," she insisted, as we, too,
+hurried back to the table and took up our towels and napkins once more.
+"There's no mistakin' them signs, and you'd be a little fool if you
+wasn't to help him along. Men's all sort of bashful, some more 'n
+others, and it's a good thing to help along. I like the looks of that
+fellow--he'd be awful silly and soft with his wife."
+
+There was gentle solicitude in the voice, and looking up, I was almost
+startled with the radiance of the girl's face--the face of a good woman
+who loves, and who takes a generous interest in the love affairs of
+another. As we leaned over the truck and began to haul out its wet
+freight, she whispered to me:
+
+"I know all about it because I've been there myself. I've got a
+gentleman-friend, too, and he's awful nice to me. He's been going with
+me five years, and he didn't shake me when I lost my eye. Lots of
+fellows I know would have backed out. That's what I like about that
+foreman. I think he'd do just the same by a girl he loved as Jim did to
+me. We'd have been married this long time, only Jim's got his hands full
+with a crazy mother, and he says she'll never go to any asylum s' long's
+he's able to keep her; and so Jim's aunt she lives with them and tends
+his mother, and it takes 'most all Jim makes, because his mother's sick
+all the time, too, and has to have the doctor and be humored. But I like
+a man that's good to his mother. Jim isn't overly strong, either, and is
+likely to break down."
+
+Late in the afternoon my partner was overcome by an attack of
+sick-headache, and dropped with nausea and exhaustion. Mrs. Mooney and
+the Queen helped her to her feet.
+
+"It's them pickles and them rotten cold lunches you girls eat," declared
+Mrs. Mooney, who was fond of talking on the nutritious properties of
+food. "Now I says, the Lord only give me one stummick, and when that's
+wore out he'll never give me another, and I can't never buy one with no
+money, and I never put anything in that stummick at noon but a good cold
+beer and a good hot plate of soup, and that's what you ought to do. Only
+cost you five cents for the both of them together, down to Devlin's
+place. We go there every day," jerking her head in the direction of her
+crony, "and you can go along if ye have a mind to."
+
+In accordance with this invitation, we became patrons of Devlin's the
+very next day. Promptly at twelve we hurried out, sleeves still rolled
+up and our damp aprons unremoved. There was no time for making a
+toilet, Mrs. Mooney insisted, as Devlin's was three blocks away, and we
+had only a half-hour. Across Lexington, across Third Avenue, and down
+one block, we came to a corner saloon, and filed in the "ladies'
+entrance." The room was filled with workmen drinking beer and smoking at
+the little round tables, and when they saw us each man jumped up, and
+grabbing his glass, went out into the barroom. Commenting upon this to
+Mrs. Mooney, she explained as we seated ourselves:
+
+"Sure, and what'd ye expect! Sure, and it's a proper hotel ye're in, and
+it's dacent wurrkin'-men that comes here, and they knows a lady when
+they see her, and they ups and goes!"
+
+In response to Mrs. Mooney's vigorous order, "Six beers with the
+trimmin's!" a waiter appeared presently with a steaming tray.
+
+"Now eat that, and drink that, and see if they don't go to the spot,"
+cried the old woman, gaily, and we all fell to, with table manners more
+eager than elegant. Whatever the soup was made of, it seemed to me the
+best soup I had ever eaten in New York, and I instantly determined never
+again to blame a working man or woman for dining in a saloon in
+preference to the more godly and respectable dairy-lunch room. We all
+ate ravenously, and I, who never before could endure the sight or smell
+of beer, found myself draining my "schooner" as eagerly as Mrs. Mooney
+herself.
+
+"My! but that braces me up," she declared, sighing deeply and licking
+the froth from her lips; "it's almost as good as whisky." It was a
+propitious moment to ask questions, and I inquired how long she had
+worked at the "Pearl."
+
+"Eighteen months, off and on. I gets the rheumatism and stay home
+sometimes. I believe in taking care of yer back. I says, I've only got
+one back, and when that's wore out the Lord ain't going to give me
+another. So I stay home; but it's so lonesome I'm always mighty glad to
+get to work ag'in."
+
+
+The long, long days sped by, their torture relieved by such comfort as
+we could find in the gossip of the table, and in daily excursions to
+Devlin's, where I had become a regular patron. The foreman, too, added a
+little variety to the monotony by coming to our table sometimes, and
+shaking clothes for a few moments with us, while he gossiped with the
+one-eyed girl and me, which unusual proceeding filled her romantic soul
+with all sorts of happy anticipation. On Saturday morning, after he had
+come and gone, she whispered ecstatically: "That fellow is stuck on
+you, and I'll bet he'll be askin' you to go to the theayter with
+him--just see if he don't!"
+
+But alas for woman's dreams! The next day we saw the boss coming across
+the floor, this time alone. He sauntered up to our table, began to fling
+jokes at us all in a manner of insolent familiarity, and asked the names
+of the new faces. When he came to me he lingered a moment and uttered
+some joking remarks of insulting flattery, and in a moment he had
+grasped my bare arm and given it a rude pinch, walking hurriedly away.
+In a few moments the foreman came back and motioned me to go with him,
+and I followed to the front of the room, where the boss stood smoking
+and joking with the wrappers. The foreman retired a respectful distance,
+and the boss, after looking me over thoughtfully, informed me that I was
+to be promoted Monday morning to the wrappers' counter.
+
+"And now run away, and be a good girl the rest of the day," he
+concluded, with a wave of the hand, and I rushed back to the table, more
+disgusted with the man and his manner than I was thankful to him for my
+promotion to a job that would pay me five dollars a week.
+
+"Didn't I tell you so!" exclaimed my friend, amid the excited comments
+and questions of the others at the table. "That's some of the foreman's
+doing, and I'm real glad for you--it's nothing more than what I've been
+expectin', though."
+
+This opinion was not shared, however, by the rest of my companions, who
+repeated divers terrible tales of moral ruin and betrayal, more or less
+apocryphal, wherein the boss was inevitably the villain. I now found
+myself suddenly the cynosure of all eyes, the target of a thousand
+whispered comments, as I moved about the workroom. The physical agony of
+aching back and blistered feet was too great, though, for me to feel any
+mental distress over the fact--for the moment at least. In the awful
+frenzy of the Saturday-afternoon rush, greater than that of any other
+day of the week, I did not care much what they thought or said about the
+boss and me.
+
+I was shaking my towels and napkins, and trying to look as indifferent
+as I believed I felt, when the foreman beckoned me again, and stepping
+aside, thrust a piece of yellow wrapping-paper into my hand.
+
+"Read it when nobody's looking," he said in a low voice; "and don't
+think wrong of me for meddling in what's not my business"; and he was
+off again.
+
+A few minutes later I read:
+
+
+     "You'd better give up this job. It's no place for a girl that wants
+     to do right. Come back Monday and get your money; and I wouldn't
+     stay to-night after six o'clock, if I was you, but go home and
+     rest. If you can't get a job as good as this inside of a day or
+     two, I think my sister can get one for you in her place; but you
+     won't stay here if you take my advice.
+
+                             "Yours truly,
+
+                                                  "J. P.
+
+     "P.S. Please don't show this, or I'd lose my job; and be sure to
+     come Monday evening for your money."
+
+
+I made at once for the cloak-room. When I emerged, a moment later, it
+was to find the narrow passage obstructed by one of the big soiled-linen
+trucks, over which "J. P." bent industriously, as if he hadn't another
+thought in the world beyond the sorting of table-cloths and napkins.
+Suddenly he lifted up his lank frame, and seeing one of his workpeople
+making her escape, he called out:
+
+"It's not six o'clock yet!"
+
+"I don't care if it isn't; I am going home," I replied promptly.
+
+"What's the matter?" he asked in a loud voice, and then, as he drew
+near, added in an undertone:
+
+"You read my note?"
+
+"Yes," I replied.
+
+"S'pose you kind of wonder at me doing it?" he went on, moving with me
+toward the staircase.
+
+"No; I guessed right away," I answered.
+
+We had now reached the top of the stairs leading to the street door, and
+were out of ear-shot of the busy workroom. The curious faces and craning
+necks were lost to us through an interposing veil of steam. The foreman
+grasped my extended hand in a limp, hasty clasp as I began to move down
+the steps.
+
+"You guessed part, but not all," he whispered, turning away.
+
+I dragged myself to the end of the block and turned into Lexington
+Avenue just as the six-o'clock whistles began to blow. So much I
+remember very distinctly, but after that all is an indistinct blur of
+clanging street-cars, of jostling crowds. I do not know whether I had
+lost my senses from the physical agony I was enduring, though still able
+to perform the mechanical process of walking, or whether it was a case
+of somnambulism; but I know that I walked on, all unconscious of where I
+was going, or of my own identity, until I came in collision with some
+one, and heard a feminine voice beg my pardon. Then a little cry, and
+two arms were thrown about me, and I looked up into the smiling face of
+Minnie Plympton--Minnie Plympton as large as life and unspeakably
+stunning in a fresh shirt-waist and sailor-hat. She was smiling at me
+like a princess issuing from her enchantment in a rose-bush; and lest
+she should vanish as suddenly as she had appeared, I clutched wildly at
+her arm, trembling and sobbing at this delicious awakening from the
+horrible nightmare that had been my existence for so many days.
+
+We were standing on the corner of Lexington Avenue and a cross-town
+thoroughfare, and ever after must that spot remain in my mind as the
+actual turning-point of my fortunes--indeed, the very turning-point of
+my whole life. As I look back upon that beautiful June evening, I again
+hear the rumble of the elevated trains in the street beyond, and again I
+hear the clang of the electric cars as they swirl out of the avenue into
+the street. Probably every man and woman who ever came a stranger to a
+great city has his or her own particular secret and holy place where
+angels came and ministered in the hour of need. I do not doubt it, but
+I do often wonder whether every such person visits his sacred place as
+often as I visit mine. I go to mine very often, especially in
+summer-time, about six o'clock, when, amid the roar and the turmoil and
+the banalities of the real and the actual, I recall the wondrous tale of
+the Burning Bush. For there God appeared to me that evening--the God who
+had hidden his face for so long.
+
+
+"Why, you look as weak as a kitten--you look sick!" Minnie declared.
+"You need a good cup of tea and to be put to bed, and I'm going to be
+the one to do it for you!"
+
+I was half dazed as Minnie Plympton bundled me into a passing electric
+car; and then, with my head leaning comfortably on Minnie Plympton's
+plump shoulder, and with Minnie Plympton's strong arm about my aching
+body, I was jolted away somewhere into a drowsy happiness.
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+Three years have elapsed since that last day in the "Pearl Laundry" and
+my providential meeting with Minnie Plympton.
+
+The events of those three years may be recounted in almost as few
+sentences, for prosperous working girls, like happy nations, have no
+history. And we have been very prosperous, Minnie Plympton and I. We, I
+say, because from the moment of our unforeseen meeting in the
+hurly-burly of that street corner, the interests of Minnie Plympton's
+life and of mine were to become, for the succeeding year, almost
+inseparable.
+
+I said we have both been very prosperous. But Minnie Plympton has been
+more than that: she has been successful--successful in the only real way
+a woman can, after all, be successful. Minnie is married. She is the
+wife of an enterprising young business man, and the mother of a charming
+baby. She has been married nearly two years, and lives in a pretty
+cottage in a peaceful suburb. It was what the world would call a good
+match, and Minnie declares she is perfectly happy. And no doubt she is,
+else that honest creature would not be so bent upon making matches for
+everybody else.
+
+As for myself, I have been merely prosperous--prosaically and
+uninterestingly, though none the less agreeably, prosperous. I do not
+know whether I am happy or not. I am still a working girl, and by all
+the portents of the dream-book I am foredoomed eternally to remain a
+wage-earner in spite of all Mrs. Minnie's good offices. For I was born
+on a Saturday; and "Saturday's child must work for its living."
+
+Now, I do not care to be accused of a superstitious faith in
+dream-books, but I do want to say that I have found all sorts of
+inspiration in a philosophical acceptance of that oracle attaching to my
+unfortunate birthday. If Saturday's child must work for her living, why
+not make the best of it? Why not make the most advantageous terms
+possible with Fate? why not work with, and not against, that inexorable
+Forelady, in coöperation with her plans and along the lines of her least
+resistance?
+
+This I have tried to do. How I have done it, and what the results have
+been, I shall now try to sketch with not more attention to tedious
+details than I feel justified in assuming may be of some help and
+encouragement to other strugglers.
+
+I became a stenographer and typewriter, earning twenty dollars a week. I
+worked hard for my money, and the day was still a long day. I went to
+work at nine o'clock in the morning, and while I was supposed to get off
+at five, and sometimes did, I was often obliged to work till six or
+seven.
+
+And this I called prosperity? Yes; for me this was prosperity, when I
+remembered the circumstances of my beginnings.
+
+When I met Minnie Plympton on the street corner, that hot summer night,
+I was "dead broke," not only in purse, but in body and spirit as well.
+She took me home with her to the two small rooms where she was doing
+light housekeeping, and where we continued to live together until her
+marriage a year later broke up our happy domestic partnership. A few
+weeks after Minnie took me home with her I got a position in the notion
+department of one of the large stores. I received only four dollars a
+week; but, as our rent was small and our living expenses the very
+minimum, I was able to meet my half of the joint expenditure. I worked
+four months at selling pins and needles and thread and whalebone and a
+thousand and one other things to be found in a well-stocked notion
+department; and then, by a stroke of good luck and Minnie Plympton's
+assistance, I got a place as demonstrator of a new brand of tea and
+coffee in the grocery department of the same "emporium." My new work was
+not only much lighter and pleasanter, but it paid me the munificent
+salary of eight dollars a week.
+
+But I did not want to be a demonstrator of tea and coffee all my life. I
+had often thought I would like to learn shorthand and typewriting. The
+demonstrator of breakfast foods at the next counter to mine was taking a
+night course in bookkeeping; which gave me the idea of taking a similar
+course in stenography. And then the Long Day began in earnest. I went to
+night-school five nights out of every week for exactly sixty weeks,
+running consecutively save for a fortnight's interim at the Christmas
+holidays, when we worked nights at the store. On Saturday night, which
+was the off night, I did my washing and ironing, and on Sunday night I
+made, mended, and darned my clothes--that is, when there was any making,
+mending, or darning to be done. As my wardrobe was necessarily slender,
+I had much time to spare. This spare time on Sunday nights I spent in
+study and reading. I studied English composition and punctuation, both
+of which I would need later on when I should become a stenographer. I
+also brushed up on my spelling and grammar, in which, I had been
+informed--and correctly--the average stenographer is sadly remiss.
+
+As for reading, which was the only recreation my life knew, it was of a
+most desultory, though always mercenary sort. I read every book I could
+get out of the circulating library which, from its title or general
+character as summarized in the newspaper reviews, I thought might help
+me to solve the problem of earning a good livelihood. The title of one
+book particularly attracted me--a book which was so much in demand that
+I had to wait a whole six months before I succeeded in getting it
+through the slow and devious process peculiar to circulating libraries.
+That book was "Up from Slavery," and it brought home to me as nothing
+else could have done what was the real trouble with myself and all the
+rest of the struggling, ill-paid, wretched working women with whom I had
+come in contact during my apprenticeship. What that trouble was I shall
+revert to later.
+
+When I had thoroughly learned the principles of my trade and had
+attained a speed of some hundred and odd words a minute, the hardest
+task was yet before me. This task was not in finding a position, but in
+filling that position satisfactorily. My first position at ten dollars a
+week I held only one day. I failed to read my notes. This was more
+because of fright and of self-consciousness, however, than of
+inefficiency. My next paid me only six dollars a week, but it was an
+excellent training-school, and in it I learned self-confidence, perfect
+accuracy, and rapidity. Although this position paid me two dollars less
+than what I had been earning brewing tea and coffee and handing it over
+the counter, and notwithstanding the fact that I knew of places where I
+could go and earn ten dollars a week, I chose to remain where I was.
+There was method in my madness, however, let me say. I had a considerate
+and conscientious employer, and although I had a great deal of work, and
+although it had to be done most punctiliously, he never allowed me to
+work a moment overtime. He opened his office at nine in the morning, and
+I was not expected before quarter after; he closed at four sharp. This
+gave me an opportunity for further improving myself with a view to
+eventually taking not a ten-dollar, but a twenty-dollar position. I went
+back to night-school and took a three months' "speed course," and at the
+same time continued to add to my general education and stock of
+knowledge by a systematic reading of popular books of science and
+economics. I became tremendously interested in myself as an economic
+factor, and I became tremendously interested in other working girls from
+a similar point of view. Of science and economics I knew nothing when I
+started out to earn my living.
+
+One day I answered an advertisement calling for the sort of stenographer
+I now believed myself to be. It brought a response signed with the name
+of a large religious publishing house. I got the position, beginning
+with a salary of fifteen dollars a week, which was to be increased to
+twenty dollars provided I could fill the position. That I should succeed
+in doing so, there was evident doubt in my employers' minds, and no
+wonder! For I was the fifth to attempt it.
+
+My work consisted for the most part in taking dictation from the editor
+of the periodical published weekly by the house--letters to
+contributors, editorials, and special articles. Also, when it was found
+that I had some intelligent, practical knowledge of grammar and
+English--and here was where my studies of the preceding year bore
+fruit--I was intrusted with the revision and correction of the least
+important of the manuscripts, thus relieving the busy editors of one of
+their most irksome tasks.
+
+One day I had occasion to mention to the editor some of the strenuous
+experiences I had undergone in my struggle to attain a decent living. He
+was startled--not to say a little shocked--that a young woman of
+apparently decent birth and upbringing should have formed such an
+intimate acquaintance with the dark side of life. Inspired by his
+sympathetic interest, I boldly interviewed the editor of a well-known
+monthly magazine, with the result that I immediately prepared two papers
+on certain of my experiences; and, to my surprise and delight, they were
+accepted.
+
+And, somehow, with the appearance of those two articles--the first
+fruits of authorship--part of the horror and loathing of that unhappy
+period of servitude fell away from me; the sordid suffering, the hurt to
+pride, the ineffaceable scar on heart and soul I felt had not been in
+vain. I can now look back upon the recent, still vivid past without a
+shiver; for there is comfort in the thought that what I have undergone
+is to be held up to others as a possible lesson and warning.
+
+And now a word as to the verity of this narrative. Have I actually been
+through all that I have described? Yes, and more; and in other cities
+beside New York.
+
+Yet for the sake of unity the order of things has been somewhat
+changed; and no record is given of many weeks, and even months, when
+life flowed uneventfully, if not smoothly, on.
+
+"But," says the thoughtful reader, "do your sordid experiences of some
+two or three years ago match conditions of to-day?" and I answer:
+Generally speaking, they do; because lately I reinforced memory by
+thorough investigation.
+
+I went further than that: when it came to me to write this little
+book--that is so absolutely a transcript from real life--I voluntarily
+labored, a week here, a week there, at various trades allied to those
+that previously had been my sole means of livelihood, and all the time
+living consistently the life of the people with whom I was thus
+temporarily associated.
+
+There were, of course, many little points that when I was a worker in
+earnest I had not eyes to see, but which my recent conscious study
+brought out in proper perspective.
+
+Yet it was as a working girl that I learned to know most of the
+characters that people this book, and which give to it any value it may
+possess.
+
+For obvious reasons, I have been obliged to give fictitious names to
+factories and shops in which I worked; and I have, in most cases,
+substituted for the names of the streets where the factories were
+located the names of streets of like character.
+
+The physical conditions, the sordid wretchedness of factory and
+workshop, of boarding-and lodging-house, I have not in any wise
+overstated.
+
+As to moral conditions, I have not been in every instance so
+scrupulously truthful--that is, I have not told all the truth. For it is
+a truth which only too often will not bear even the suggestion of
+telling. Only in two or three instances--for example, in my account of
+Henrietta Manners--have I ventured to hint definitely at anything
+pertaining to the shame and iniquity underlying a discouragingly large
+part of the work-girls' world. In my magazine articles I was obliged to
+leave out all reference to this tabooed topic. The attitude of the
+public, especially the American public, toward this subject is a curious
+mixture of prudery and gallantry. It bridles at anything which impeaches
+the traditional honor and chastity of the working girl. The chivalry of
+American men--and my experience in workshop, store, and factory has
+proved to me how genuine and deep-rooted that chivalry is--combined with
+our inherent spirit of democracy, is responsible for the placing of the
+work-girl, as a class, in a light as false and ridiculous as that in
+which Don Quixote was wont to view the charms of his swineherd lady,
+Dulcinea. In the main, our notions of the woman who toils do more credit
+to our sentiments and to the impulses of our hearts than they do credit
+to our heads or to any serious desires we may cherish for her welfare.
+She has become, and is becoming more and more, the object of such an
+amount of sentimentality on the part of philanthropists, sociological
+investigators, labor agitators, and yellow journals--and a goodly share
+of journalism that prides itself upon not being yellow--that the real
+work-girl has been quite lost sight of. Her name suggests, according to
+their imaginations, a proud, independent, self-reliant, efficient young
+woman--a young woman who works for her living and is glad of it. One
+hardly dares criticize her, unless, indeed, it be to lecture her for an
+ever-increasing independence of her natural male protectors and an
+alleged aversion to babies.
+
+That we should cling so tenaciously to this ideal is to our honor and
+glory. But fine words butter no parsnips; nor do our fine idealizations
+serve to reduce the quota which the working-girl ranks contribute to
+disreputable houses and vicious resorts. The factories, the workshops,
+and to some extent the stores, of the kind that I have worked in at
+least, are recruiting-grounds for the Tenderloin and the "red light"
+districts. The Springers and the "Pearl Laundries" send annually a large
+consignment of delinquents to their various and logical destinations. It
+is rare indeed that one finds a female delinquent who has not been in
+the beginning a working girl. For, sad and terrible though it be, the
+truth is that the majority of "unfortunates," whether of the
+specifically criminal or of the prostitute class, are what they are, not
+because they are inherently vicious, but _because they were failures as
+workers and as wage-earners_. They were failures as such, primarily, for
+no other reason than that they did not like to work. And they did not
+like to work, not because they are lazy--they are anything but lazy, as
+a rule--but _because they did not know how to work_.
+
+Few girls know how to work when they undertake the first job, whether
+that job be making paper boxes, seaming corset-covers, or taking
+shorthand dictation. Nor by the term, "knowing how to work," do I mean,
+necessarily, lack of experience. One may have had no experience whatever
+in any line of work, yet one may know _how_ to work--may understand the
+general principles of intelligent labor. These general principles a girl
+may learn equally well by means of a normal-school training or through
+familiarity with, and participation in, the domestic labor of a
+well-organized household. The working girl in a great city like New York
+does not have the advantage of either form of training. Her education,
+even at the best, is meager, and of housework she knows less than
+nothing. If she is city-born, it is safe to assume that she has never
+been taught how to sweep a room properly, nor how to cook the simplest
+meal wholesomely, nor how to make a garment that she would be willing to
+wear. She usually buys all her cheap finery at a cheap store, and such
+style and taste as she displays is "ready made."
+
+Not having learned to work, either at school or at home, she goes to the
+factory, to the workshop, or to the store, crude, incompetent, and,
+worst of all, with an instinctive antagonism toward her task. _She
+cannot work, and she does not work. She is simply "worked."_ And there
+is all the difference in the world between "working" and "being worked."
+To work is a privilege and a boon to either man or woman, and, properly
+regulated, it ought to be a pleasure. To be worked is degrading. To work
+is dignified and ennobling, for to work means the exercise of the mental
+quite as much as the physical self. But the average working girl puts
+neither heart nor mind into her labor; she is merely a machine, though
+the comparison is a libel upon the functions of first-class machinery.
+
+The harsh truth is that, hard as the working girl is "worked," and
+miserable as her remuneration is, she is usually paid quite as much as
+she is worth.
+
+For her incompetency she is not entirely to blame; rather is it a matter
+of heredity and environment. Being a girl, it is not natural to her to
+work systematically. The working woman is a new product; in this country
+she is hardly three generations old. As yet she is as new to the idea of
+what it really means to work as is the Afro-American citizen. The
+comparison may not be flattering to our vanity, but, after a reading of
+Booker Washington's various expositions of the industrial abilities of
+the negro, I cannot but be convinced that the white working woman is in
+a corresponding process of evolution, so far as her specific functions
+for labor have been developed.
+
+Conditions in the "Pearl," from the view-point of mere physical labor,
+were the most brutal in all my experience; but, from what I can learn,
+the "Pearl" is no worse than many other similar establishments. Young
+women will work in such places only as a last resort, for young women
+cannot work long under conditions so detrimental to bodily health. The
+regular workers are old women--women like Mrs. Mooney and her cronies.
+The steady workers at the "Pearl" were, with the exception of the
+"queen," all old women. Every day saw the arrival of a new force of
+young hands who were bound to "play out" at the end of three or four
+days' apprenticeship, if not sooner. I played out completely: I didn't
+walk a step for a week after I went home with Minnie Plympton that
+Saturday night. Which was all in accord with Mrs. Mooney's prediction
+the first day: "You won't last long, mind ye; you young uns never do. If
+you ain't strong as an ox it gits in your back and off ye go to the
+'orspital; and if you're not able to stand the drivin', and thinks
+you're good-lookin', off you goes to the bad, sooner 'n stay here."
+
+I would like to dwell for a moment upon the character and personality of
+her whom I have more than once referred to as the "queen." The queen had
+worked, I was told, for seven years in the laundry, and she was, as I
+saw and knew her in those days, as fresh as the proverbial daisy. She
+seemed the very embodiment of blithesome happiness. In the chapter
+dealing with the laundry I had occasion to speak of her voluptuous
+beauty. Her long years of hard labor--and she labored harder than any
+one else there--seemed to have wrought no effect upon her handsome,
+nerveless body. Her lovely eyes, her hair, her dazzling complexion and
+perfect features, were all worthy the reputation of a stage beauty. She
+was kind; in her rough, uncouth way, she was kind to everybody--so kind,
+in fact, that she was generally popular, though envied as enjoying the
+boss's favor. And, as may be imagined, her influence, during those seven
+years, upon the underfed, underpaid, ignorant, unskilled green hands who
+streamed into the "Pearl" every morning must have been endless for evil.
+
+On the subject of morality I am constrained to express myself with
+apparent diffidence, lest I be misinterpreted and charged with vilifying
+the class to which I once belonged. And yet behind my diffidence of
+expression I must confess to a very honest and uncompromising belief,
+founded upon my own knowledge and observation, that the average working
+girl is even more poorly equipped for right living and right thinking
+than she is for intelligent industrial effort. One of the worst features
+of my experience was being obliged to hear the obscene stories which
+were exchanged at the work-table quite as a matter of course; and, if
+not a reflection of vicious minds, this is at least indicative of loose
+living and inherent vulgarity. The lewd joke, the abominable tale, is
+the rule, I assert positively, and not the exception, among the lower
+class of working girls with whom I toiled in those early months of my
+apprenticeship. The flower-manufactory in Broadway was the one glorious
+exception. I do not attempt to account for this exception to the general
+rule, unless it be explainable upon the logical theory that the skill
+necessary for the making of artificial flowers is found only in a vastly
+superior class of girls. The flower-girls I met at Rosenberg's were,
+without exception, wholesome-minded and pure-hearted. They knew how to
+cook, as they had ample opportunity of proving at our luncheons and
+dinners during those four busy, happy weeks. I never met factory-girls
+in any other line of employment who knew how to make a cup of tea or
+coffee that was fit to drink. The flower-girls gave every evidence of
+having come from homes which, humble though many of them must have been,
+were nevertheless well-ordered and clean. The girls I met in other
+places seemed never to have lived in homes at all.
+
+In the telling of the obscene story, Jew and Gentile, Catholic and
+Protestant, were equally guilty.
+
+That the responsibility for these conditions of moral as well as
+physical wretchedness is fundamentally attributable to our present
+socio-economic system is a fact that has been stated so often before,
+and by writers who by right of specialized knowledge and scientific
+training are so much better equipped to discuss social economics than I
+may ever hope to be, that I need not repeat the axiom here. Nor would it
+be any more becoming for me to enter into any discussion of the various
+theories upon which the economists and the social reformers base their
+various projects for the reconstruction of the present system.
+Personally I have a strong prejudice in favor of the trades-union. I
+believe that working women should awaken as quickly as possible to the
+advantages to be derived from organization of the industries in which
+they are employed. But I seem to be alone in my cherished desire. The
+women and girls I have worked with in New York do not view the
+trades-union as their more progressive and enlightened sisters of
+Chicago and the West generally choose to regard it. Chicago alone shows
+a roster of nearly forty thousand women and girls who are organized into
+unions of their own, officered by themselves and with their own feminine
+"walking delegates." I recently spent four weeks among these
+trades-unions, numbering thirty-five distinct women's organizations, and
+I found, everywhere I went, the same enthusiasm for, and the same
+superior degree of intelligence regarding, the aim and object of the
+organization idea.
+
+As for the working women of New York, they have so far refused to
+countenance the trades-union. New York has no woman's trades-union. A
+small percentage of women workers belong to labor organizations, it is
+true; but it is merely as auxiliaries to the men's unions, and where
+they work at trades that have been thoroughly organized for the benefit
+of the men workers. They belong to these unions always under protest,
+not of their own volition; because they are obliged to do so in order to
+be permitted to work at their trades in competition with men who are
+organized.
+
+For this reason, owing to the blindness of the workwoman to the benefits
+to be derived from organization,--and because, moreover, it has not yet
+been proved that the trades-union, carried to its logical conclusion, is
+likely to be a panacea for the industrial woes of the sex which does
+favor and support it--it seems to me rather idle to urge its wider
+adoption under the protest of those most vitally concerned--the women
+workers themselves. The idea of organized labor will have to grow among
+the ranks of women workers just as the idea has grown into the
+consciousness of her father and brother.
+
+We have a great and crying need for two things--things which it is
+entirely within the power of a broad-minded philanthropy to supply. The
+most urgent of these needs is a very material and unpoetic one. We need
+a well-regulated system of boarding-and lodging-houses where we can live
+with decency upon the small wages we receive. We do not want any
+so-called "working girls' homes"--God forgive the euphemism!--which,
+while overcharging us for the miserable accommodations, at the same time
+would put us in the attitude of charity dependants. What the working
+girl needs is a cheap hotel or a system of hotels--for she needs a great
+many of them--designed something after the Mills Hotels for working-men.
+She also needs a system of well-regulated lodging-houses, such as are
+scattered all over the city for the benefit of men. My experience of the
+working girls' home in which I lived for many weeks, and from my
+observation and inquiries regarding a number of similar "homes" which I
+have since visited, justifies me in making a few suggestions regarding
+the general plan and conduct of the ideal philanthropic scheme which I
+have in mind.
+
+First and most important, there must be no semblance of charity. Let the
+working girls' hotel and the working girls' lodging-house be not only
+self-supporting, but so built and conducted that they will pay a fair
+rate of interest upon the money invested. Otherwise they would fail of
+any truly philanthropic object.
+
+As to their conduct as institutions there should be no rules, no
+regulations which are not in full operation in the Waldorf-Astoria or
+the Hotel St. Regis. The curse of all such attempts in the past has been
+the insistence upon _coercive morality_. Make them not only
+non-sectarian, but non-religious. There is no more need of conducting a
+working girls' hotel or lodging-house in the name of God or under the
+auspices of religious sentiment than there is necessity for advertising
+the Martha Washington Hotel or any fashionable bachelor-apartment house
+as being under divine guidance.
+
+A clean room and three wholesomely cooked meals a day _can_ be furnished
+to working girls at a price such as would make it possible for them to
+live honestly on the small wage of the factory and store. We do not ask
+for luxuries or dainties. We do not get them in the miserable, dark
+warrens where we are now obliged to sleep, and we do not get them at the
+unappetizing boarding-house tables where countless thousands of us find
+sustenance. I do not know--I suppose nobody does know--how many working
+girls in New York City live in lodging-and boarding-houses. But they are
+legion, and very few of them are contented with that life.
+
+The most important necessity of the model working woman's hotel or
+lodging-house would be, not a luxurious table, not a dainty
+sleeping-room, but a parlor! The number of young girls who go wrong in a
+great city like this for want of the various necessities of a parlor
+must make the angels in heaven weep. The houses where the poorly paid
+girl lives have no accommodations for the entertainment of her male
+friends. If the house is conducted with any respect for the conventions,
+the girl lodger must meet her young man on the "stoop" or on the street
+corner. As the courtship progresses, they must have recourse either to
+the benches of the public parks, provided the weather be favorable, or
+else to the light and warmth of the back room of a saloon. The average
+cheap lodging-house is usually conducted, however, with but scant
+regard for the conventions, and the girl usually is forced to adopt the
+more convenient and, as it would seem to her, really more
+self-respecting habit of receiving her company in her room. And either
+one of these methods of courtship, it is evident, cannot but be in the
+end demoralizing and degrading to thoughtless young people, however
+innocent they may be of any deliberate wrong-doing. In the model
+lodging-house there should be perfect liberty of conduct and action on
+the part of guests--who will not be "inmates" in any sense of the word.
+Such guests should have perfect liberty to go and come when they please
+at any hour of the day or night; be permitted to see any person they
+choose to have come, without question or challenge, so long as the
+conventions of ordinary social life are complied with. Such an
+institution, conducted upon such a plan and managed so that it would
+make fair returns to its promoters, cannot fail to be welcomed; and
+would be of inestimable benefit as an uplifting and regenerative force
+with those for whom it is designed.
+
+The other need is for a greater interest in the workwoman's welfare on
+the part of the church, and an effort by that all-powerful institution
+to bring about some adjustment of her social and economic difficulties.
+I am old-fashioned enough to believe in the supreme efficacy of
+organized religion in relation to womanhood, and all that pertains to
+womanhood. I believe that, in our present state of social development,
+the church can do more for the working girl than any of the proposed
+measures based upon economic science or the purely ethical theory.
+Working women as a class are certainly not ripe for the trades-union, as
+I have already intimated; and the earnest people of the "settlements"
+are able to reach but a small part of the great army of women marching
+hopelessly on, ungeneraled, untrained, and, worst of all, uncaring.
+
+Few are they who, like Tolstoi, can gracefully stoop to conquer; and
+those who shall be ordained to revolutionize conditions will rise from
+the ranks, even as did Booker T. Washington. This, of course, is the
+ultimate object of settlement work: to prepare the leaven for the loaf.
+
+But a live and progressive church--a church imbued with the Christian
+spirit in the broadest and most liberal interpretation of the term--can
+do for us, and do it quickly and at once, more than all the college
+settlements and all the trades-unions that can be organized within the
+next ten years could hope to do. And for this reason: the church has all
+the machinery ready, set up and waiting only for the proper hand to put
+it in motion to this great end. The Christian church has a vast
+responsibility in the solution of all problems of the social order, and
+none of those problems is more grave or urgent than the one affecting
+the economic condition of the wage-earning woman. It is curious that the
+church, in this age, should choose to regard its primary function with
+such evident apathy. The first business of the church in the past was
+the adjustment of social difficulties. The gospel of Jesus Christ was
+preëminently a social gospel, and when the church ceases to be a social
+force it will have outlived its usefulness.
+
+There are those who believe that the church _has_ outlived that primal
+usefulness. I do not believe so. For men, perhaps, it has; but not for
+women--certainly not for working women. We do not as a sex, we do not as
+a class, flatter ourselves that we have got along so far in race
+development that we have no further need of organized religion. In all
+my experience of meeting and talking, often becoming intimately
+acquainted, with girls and women of all sorts, I have never known one,
+however questionable, to whom the church was not, after all, held in
+respect as the one all-powerful human institution.
+
+And yet, unless they were Catholics, mighty few went to church at all,
+and most of them were resentful, often bitter, toward the church and
+hostile toward all kinds of organized religion. They accused the church
+of not doing its duty toward them, and they declared that organized
+religion was a sham and a hypocrisy.
+
+The only activity exerted by the church in the direction indicated
+partakes too strongly of the eleemosynary nature to make it acceptable
+to any save the most degraded--the weak-chinned, flabby-natured horde of
+men and women who rally instinctively to the drum-taps of the
+street-corner Salvationist, or seek warmth and cheer on cold winter
+nights, and if possible more substantial benefits, from the missions and
+"church houses."
+
+I have no quarrel to pick with the Salvation Army, nor with the city
+missions, as institutions. Both have done too much good for that "ninety
+and nine" which the church forgets. But it is a pity that the work of
+the Salvation Army and of the city missions is sometimes relegated to
+the control of such incompetent and unworthy persons as Henrietta
+Manners and "Brother" Mason. Since my brief acquaintance with those
+aspiring reformers, I have investigated and found that both were
+prominent workers and "guides" in the respective religious movements to
+which they claimed allegiance; I also found that there were other
+Henrietta Mannerses and not a few "Brother" Masons interested in the
+same good work. It is the part of charity and justice to assume that
+their superior officers were totally ignorant of their real characters.
+
+But why should these sacred duties be relegated to the Henrietta
+Mannerses and the "Brother" Masons? Are there not enough intelligent,
+conscientious Christian men and women among the churches who would
+consider it not only a duty, but a precious privilege, to carry the
+gospel of Jesus Christ into the dark places? It is not wise to set a
+thief to catch a thief, and it is worse than useless to encourage the
+weak, not to say the depraved, to carry the gospel to their kind.
+
+In the days when I could see no silver lining to the clouds I tried
+going to a Protestant church, but I recognized very shortly the
+alienation between it and me. Personally, I do not like to attend
+Salvation meetings or listen to the mission evangelists. So I ceased any
+pretension of going to church, thus allying myself with that great
+aggregation of non-church-going Protestant working women who have been
+forced into a resentful attitude against that which we should love and
+support. It is encouraging, however, to find that the church itself
+has, at last, begun to heed our growing disaffection and alienation:
+
+
+     "The fact must be admitted that the wage-workers of this country
+     are largely outside the churches. This breach has been steadily
+     widening; conditions are worse now than they were ten years ago.
+     One of the strongest reasons for this is the fact that the churches
+     have not recognized so clearly as they ought the equities of this
+     conflict. It is a grave failure. They ought never to have suffered
+     such an alienation to occur between themselves and the people who
+     constitute the very bone and sinew of our civilization," says a
+     prominent preacher and reformer.
+
+     "How can the Christian church clear herself of the charge that the
+     very people who heard her Lord gladly turn in multitudes from her
+     threshold? There is need of sober thought and deep humiliation,
+     that this most grave social problem may find a solution which shall
+     bring honor to the church and peace to society."[1]
+
+
+Obviously the fundamental need of the worker of either sex is
+education. She needs to be educated, this work-girl. She does not need a
+fancy education; but she does need a good education, so that upon her
+entrance into the workshop she will be able to read and write and add up
+a column of figures correctly and with ease. This she seems not to be
+able to do under present conditions. And there are other things, even
+more important than the "three R's," which she should be taught. She
+should be taught how to work--how to work _intelligently_. She should be
+trained young in the fundamental race activities, in the natural human
+instinct for making something with the hands, or of doing something with
+the hands, and of taking an infinite pleasure in making it perfect, in
+doing it well.
+
+I have no technical knowledge of pedagogics; I must admit that. My
+criticism of the public-school system I base entirely upon the results
+as I have seen them in the workshops, the factories, and the store in
+which I worked. During this period I had opportunity for meeting many
+hundreds of girls and for becoming more or less acquainted with them
+all. Now, of all these I have not yet discovered one who had not at some
+time in her earlier childhood or girlhood attended a public school.
+Usually the girl had had at least five years' continuous schooling, but
+often it was much more. But, great or small as the period of her tuition
+had been, I never met one whose knowledge of the simplest rudiments of
+learning was confident and precise. Spelling, geography, grammar,
+arithmetic, were never, with them, positive knowledge, but rather
+matters of chance and guess. Even the brightest girls showed a woeful
+ignorance of the "three R's." In only one thing did I find them
+universally well taught, and that was in handwriting. However badly
+spelled and ungrammatical their written language might be, it was
+invariably neatly and legibly--often beautifully--executed. But if these
+girls, these workmates of mine, learned to write clear and beautiful
+hands, why were they not able also to learn how to spell, why were they
+not able to learn the principles of grammar and the elementary knowledge
+of arithmetic as far at least as long division? That they did not have
+sufficient "apperceiving basis" I cannot believe, for they were
+generally bright and clever.
+
+It is true that the public schools are already teaching manual training,
+and that kindergartens have enormously increased lately. These facts I
+know very well. I also know how much ignorance and senseless prejudice
+the pioneers of these educational reforms have had to overcome in the
+introduction of the newer and better methods. The point I wish to make
+carries no slur upon the ideal which the best modern pedagogy is
+striving for; it is, on the contrary, an appeal for the support and
+furtherance of that ideal on the part of intelligent citizenship
+generally, and of conscientious parenthood particularly. I believe
+firmly in the kindergarten; I believe that the child, whether rich or
+poor, who goes to kindergarten in his tender years has a better chance
+in life, all else being equal, than the child who does not. I do not
+know how long the free kindergarten system has obtained to any degree in
+New York City, but I do know that I have as yet found only one working
+girl who has had the benefit of any such training in childhood. She was
+"Lame Lena" at Springer's box-factory; and in spite of her deformity,
+which made it difficult for her to walk across the floor, she was the
+quickest worker and made more money than any other girl in the shop.
+
+Tersely put, and quoting her own speech, the secret of her success was
+in "knowing how to kill two birds with one stone," and, again, "makin'
+of your cocoanut save your muscle." These formulæ were more or less
+vague until further inquiry elicited the interesting fact that "lame
+Lena," had had in childhood the privilege of a kindergarten training in
+a class maintained by some church society when the free kindergarten
+was not so general as it is now.
+
+It is not unreasonable to suppose that had this lame girl's workmates
+enjoyed the privilege of the same elementary training, they might have
+shown an equal facility in the humble task of pasting and labeling and
+tissuing paper boxes. "Lame Lena" knew how to work; she knew how to
+husband every modicum of nervous energy in her frail, deformed body; and
+thus she was able to make up--more than make up--for her physical
+inferiority. "Lame Lena" brought to her sordid task a certain degree of
+organizing faculty; she did the various processes rhythmically and
+systematically, always with the idea in view of making one stroke of the
+arm or the hand do, if possible, a double or a triple duty. The other
+girls worked helter-skelter; running hither and thither; taking many
+needless journeys back and forth across the floor; hurrying when they
+were fresh to the task, dawdling when they were weary, but at all times
+working without method and without organization of the task in hand, and
+without that coördination of muscular and mental effort which the
+kindergarten might have taught them, just as it had certainly taught
+"Lame Lena."
+
+The free kindergarten movement is not yet old enough to begin to show
+its effects to any perceptible degree in the factory and workshop.
+Henrietta Manners and Phoebe Arlington and little Angelina were born too
+soon: they did not know the joy of the kindergarten; they did not know
+the delight of sitting in a little red chair in a great circle of other
+little red chairs filled with other little girls, each and all learning
+the rudimentary principles of work under the blissful delusion that they
+were at play. These joys have been reserved for their little sisters,
+who, sooner or later, will step into their vacant places in the
+box-factory. What was denied Angelina it is the blessed privilege of
+Angelina's baby to revel in.
+
+Angelina's baby--the little baby that she kept in the day-nursery when
+we worked together at Springer's--now goes to a free kindergarten. I
+happen to know this because not long ago I met Angelina. She did not
+recognize me--indeed, she had difficulty in recalling vaguely that I had
+worked with her once upon a time; for Angelina's memory, like that of a
+great majority of her hard-worked class, is very poor,--a fact I mention
+because it is very much to the point right here. My solicitous inquiry
+for the baby brought forth a burst of Latin enthusiasm as to the
+cunningness and sweetness of that incipient box-maker, who, Angelina
+informed me, goes to kindergarten in a free hack along with a crowd of
+other babies. But Angelina, bless her soul! is down on the kindergarten.
+She says, with a pout and a contemptuous shrug, "they don't teach you're
+kid nothing but nonsense, just cutting up little pieces of paper and
+singing fool songs and marching to music." Angelina admitted, however,
+that her _bambino_ was supremely happy there,--so happy, in fact, that
+she hadn't the heart to take her away, even though she does know that it
+is all "tomfoolishness" the "kid" is being taught by a mistaken
+philanthropy.
+
+It is fair to suppose that in the factory and workshop of every
+description the kindergarten is bound to work incalculable results.
+Indeed, I sometimes wonder if the kindergarteners themselves can quite
+realize how well they are building--can fully comprehend the very great
+need in the working woman of the identical principles which they are so
+patiently and faithfully inculcating into the tender minds of these
+forlorn babies gathered up in the courts and alleys.
+
+Another important thing looking to the well-being of the working girl of
+the future would be the wide dissemination of a better literature than
+that with which she now regales herself. I have already outlined at
+some length the literary tastes of my workmates at the box-factory. The
+example cited is typical of other factories and other workshops, and
+also of the department-store. A certain downtown section of New York
+City is monopolized by the publishers and binders of "yellow-backs,"
+which are turned out in bales and cart-loads daily. Girls fed upon such
+mental trash are bound to have distorted and false views of everything.
+There is a broad field awaiting some original-minded philanthropist who
+will try to counteract the maudlin yellow-back by putting in its place
+something wholesome and sweet and sane. Only, please, Mr. or Mrs.
+Philanthropist, don't let it be Shakspere, or Ruskin, or Walter Pater.
+Philanthropists have tried before to reform degraded literary tastes
+with heroic treatment, and they have failed every time.
+
+That is sometimes the trouble with the college-settlement folk. They
+forget that Shakspere, and Ruskin, and all the rest of the really true
+and great literary crew, are infinite bores to every-day people. I know
+personally, and love deeply and sincerely, a certain young woman--a
+settlement-worker--who for several years conducted an evening class in
+literature for some girl "pants-makers." She gave them all the classics
+in allopathic doses, she gave them copies of "A Crown of Wild Olive"
+and "The Ethics of the Dust," which they read dutifully, not because
+they liked the books, which were meaningless to their tired heads, but
+because they loved Miss ---- and enjoyed the evenings spent with her at
+the settlement. But Miss ---- did not succeed in supplanting their old
+favorites, which undoubtedly she could have done had she given them all
+the light, clean present-day romance they could possibly read. It is a
+curious fact that these girls will not read stories laid in the past,
+however full of excitement they may be. They like romance of the present
+day, stories which have to do with scenes and circumstances not too far
+removed from the real and the actual. All their trashy favorites have to
+do with the present, with heroes and heroines who live in New York City
+or Boston or Philadelphia; who go on excursions to Coney Island, to Long
+Branch, or to Delaware Water Gap; and who, when they die, are buried in
+Greenwood over in Brooklyn, or in Woodlawn up in Westchester County. In
+other words, any story, to absorb their interest, must cater to the very
+primitive feminine liking for identity. This liking, this passion, their
+own special authors have thoroughly comprehended, and keep it constantly
+in mind in the development of their plots.
+
+This taste for better literature could be helped along immeasurably if
+still another original-minded philanthropist were to make it his
+business that no tenement baby should be without its "Mother Goose" and,
+a little later, its "Little Women," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "Robinson
+Crusoe," and all the other precious childhood favorites. As it is, the
+majority know nothing about them.
+
+
+But, after all, the greatest factor in the ultimate development of the
+working girl as a wage-earning unit--the most potent force for the
+adjustment of all the difficulties besetting her at every turn, and for
+the righting of all her wrongs, social, economic, or moral--will be the
+attitude which she herself assumes toward the dispassionate
+consideration of those difficulties to be adjusted, and of those wrongs
+to be righted.
+
+At the present time there is nobody so little concerned about herself
+and her condition as the working woman herself. Taking everything into
+consideration, and in spite of conditions which, to the observer viewing
+them at a distance great enough to get a perspective, seem
+irreconcilably harsh and bitter--in the face of all this, one must
+characterize the working woman as a contented, if not a happy woman.
+That is the great trouble that will have to be faced in any effort to
+alleviate her condition. She is too contented, too happy, too patient.
+But not wholesomely so. Hers is a contentment, a happiness, a patience
+founded, not in normal good health and the joy of living and working,
+but in apathy. Her lot is hard, but she has grown used to it; for, being
+a woman, she is patient and long-suffering. She does not entirely
+realize the tragedy of it all, and what it means to herself, or to her
+children perhaps yet to be born.
+
+In the happy future, the working girl will no longer be content to be
+merely "worked." Then she will have learned to work. She will have
+learned to work intelligently, and, working thus, she will begin to
+think--to think about herself and all those things which most vitally
+concern her as a woman and as a wage-earner. And then, you may depend
+upon it, she will settle the question to please herself, and she will
+settle it in the right way.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] "The Church and Social Problems," by Rev. Washington Gladden, D.D.
+("International Quarterly.")
+
+
+
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Long Day, by Dorothy Richardson</title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+
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+<body>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Long Day, by Dorothy Richardson</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The Long Day</p>
+<p>       The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself</p>
+<p>Author: Dorothy Richardson</p>
+<p>Release Date: January 29, 2010  [eBook #31118]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONG DAY***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Martin Pettit,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[Pg iii]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>THE LONG DAY</h1>
+
+<h2>THE STORY OF A NEW YORK WORK-<br />ING GIRL * * AS TOLD BY HERSELF</h2>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/logo.jpg" width='100' height='104' alt="Logo" /></div>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>NEW YORK<br />THE CENTURY CO.<br />1905</h3>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/frontis.jpg" width='474' height='700' alt="frontispiece" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>Copyright, 1905, by<br /><span class="smcap">The Century Co.</span></h4>
+
+<h4><i>Published October, 1905</i></h4>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>THE DEVINNE PRESS</h4>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="block">
+<h3>TO MY THREE "LADY-FRIENDS"</h3>
+
+<p>Happy, fortunate Minnie; Bessie, of gentle memory; and that other,
+silent figure in the tragedy of Failure, the long-lost, erring Eunice,
+with the hope that, if she still lives, her eye may chance to fall upon
+this page, and reading the message of this book, she may heed.</p></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table summary="contents">
+<tr><td align='left' colspan='2'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;CHAPTER</td><td align='right'>PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>I&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">In which I Arrive in New York</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>II&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">In which I Start Out in Quest of Work</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>III&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">I Try "Light" Housekeeping in a Fourteenth-street Lodging-house</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>IV&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Wherein Fate Brings Me Good Fortune in One Hand and Disaster in the Other</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_44">44</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>V&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">In which I am "Learned" by Ph&oelig;be in the Art of Box-making</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_58">58</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VI&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">In which Ph&oelig;be and Mrs. Smith Hold Forth upon Music and Literature</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VII&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">In which I Acquire a Story-book Name and Make the Acquaintance of Miss Henrietta Manners</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_92">92</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VIII&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Wherein I Walk through Dark and Devious Ways with Henrietta Manners</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_108">108</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>IX&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Introducing Henrietta's "Special Gentleman-friend"</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_123">123</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>X&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">In which I Find Myself a Homeless Wanderer in the Night</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_142">142</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XI&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">I Become an "Inmate" of a Home for Working Girls</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_151">151</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span>XII&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">In which I Spend a Happy Four Weeks Making Artificial Flowers</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_180">180</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XIII&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Three "Lady-friends," and the Adventures that Befall Them</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_197">197</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XIV&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">In which a Tragic Fate Overtakes my "Lady-friends"</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_215">215</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XV&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">I Become a "Shaker" in a Steam-laundry</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_229">229</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XVI&nbsp;</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">In which it is Proved to Me that the Darkest Hour Comes Just Before the Dawn</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_249">249</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Epilogue</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_266">266</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>THE LONG DAY</h1>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h2>I</h2>
+
+<h3>IN WHICH I ARRIVE IN NEW YORK</h3>
+
+<p>The rain was falling in great gray blobs upon the skylight of the little
+room in which I opened my eyes on that February morning whence dates the
+chronological beginning of this autobiography. The jangle of a bell had
+awakened me, and its harsh, discordant echoes were still trembling upon
+the chill gloom of the daybreak. Lying there, I wondered whether I had
+really heard a bell ringing, or had only dreamed it. Everything about me
+was so strange, so painfully new. Never before had I waked to find
+myself in that dreary, windowless little room, and never before had I
+lain in that narrow, unfriendly bed.</p>
+
+<p>Staring hard at the streaming skylight, I tried to think, to recall some
+one of the circumstances that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> might possibly account for my having
+entered that room and for my having laid me down on that cot. When? and
+how? and why? How inexplicable it all was in those first dazed moments
+after that rude awakening! And then, as the fantasies of a dream
+gradually assume a certain vague order in the waking recollection, there
+came to me a confused consciousness of the events of the preceding
+twenty-four hours&mdash;the long journey and the weariness of it; the
+interminable frieze of flying landscape, with its dreary, snow-covered
+stretches blurred with black towns; the shriek of the locomotive as it
+plunged through the darkness; the tolling of ferry-bells, and then, at
+last, the slow sailing over a black river toward and into a giant city
+that hung splendid upon the purple night, turret upon turret, and tower
+upon tower, their myriad lights burning side by side with the stars, a
+city such as the prophets saw in visions, a city such as dreamy
+childhood conjures up in the muster of summer clouds at sunset.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly out of this chaotic recollection of unearthly splendors came
+the memory, sharp and pinching, of a new-made grave on a wind-swept hill
+in western Pennsylvania. With equal suddenness, too, the fugue of
+thundering locomotives, and shrieking whistles, and sad, sweet tollings
+of ferry-bells massed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> itself into the clangorous music of a terrifying
+monody&mdash;"<span class="smaller">WORK OR STARVE, WORK OR STARVE</span>!"</p>
+
+<p>And then I remembered! An unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl
+of eighteen, utterly alone in the world, I was a stranger in a strange
+city which I had not yet so much as seen by daylight. I was a waif and a
+stray in the mighty city of New York. Here I had come to live and to
+toil&mdash;out of the placid monotony of a country town into the storm and
+stress of the wide, wide, workaday world. Very wide awake now, I jumped
+out of bed upon the cold oil-cloth and touched a match to the pile of
+paper and kindling-wood in the small stove. There was a little puddle of
+water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip in
+falling had brushed against the sleeve of my shirt-waist and soaked into
+the soles of my only pair of shoes. I dressed as quickly as the cold and
+my sodden garments permitted. On the washstand I found a small tin ewer
+and a small tin basin to match, and I dabbed myself gingerly in the cold, stale water.</p>
+
+<p>Another jangle of the harsh bell, and I went down dark stairs to the
+basement and to breakfast, wondering if I should be able to recognize
+Miss Jamison; for I had caught but a glimpse of my new landlady on my
+arrival the previous midnight. Wrapped in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> faded French flannel
+kimono, her face smeared with cold cream, her hair done up in curling
+"kids," she had met and arranged terms with me on the landing in front
+of her bedroom door as the housemaid conducted me aloft. Making due
+allowance for the youth-and-beauty-destroying effects of the kimono,
+curling "kids," and cold cream, and substituting in their stead a snug
+corset, an undulated pompadour, and a powdered countenance,
+respectively, I knew about what to look for in the daylight Miss
+Jamison. A short, plump, blonde lady in the middle forties, I predicted
+to myself. The secretary of the Young Women's Christian Association, to
+which I had written some weeks before for information as to respectable
+and cheap boarding-houses, had responded with a number of names and
+addresses, among them that of Miss Elmira Jamison, "a lady of very high Christian ideals."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Jamison was no disappointment. She fulfilled perfectly all my
+preconceived notions of what she would look like when properly attired.
+Spying me the moment I got inside the dining-room door, she immediately
+pounced upon me and hurried me off to a seat, when a girl in a dirty
+white apron began to unload off a tray a clatter of small dishes under
+my nose, while another servant tossed a wet,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> warm napkin upon my plate.
+My breakfast consisted of heterogeneous little dabs of things in the
+collection of dishes, and which I ate with not the greatest relish in
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>There were several score of breakfasters in the two big rooms, which
+seemed to occupy the entire basement floor. They ate at little tables
+set uncomfortably close together. Gradually my general observations
+narrowed down to the people at my own table. I noticed a young man
+opposite who wore eye-glasses and a carefully brushed beard; an old
+lady, with a cataract in her left eye, who sat at the far end of the
+table; a little fidgety, stupid-looking, and very ugly woman who sat
+next the bearded young man; and a young girl, with dancing, roguish
+black eyes, who sat beside me. The bearded young man talked at a great
+rate, and judging from the cackling laughter of the fidgety woman and
+the intensely interested expression of the cataracted lady, the subject
+was one of absorbing interest.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually I discovered that the topic of discourse was none other than
+our common hostess and landlady; and gradually, too, I found myself
+listening to the history of Miss Elmira Jamison's career as a purveyor
+of bed and board to impecunious and homeless mortals.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p><p>Five years ago Miss Jamison had come into this shabby though eminently
+respectable neighborhood, and opened a small boarding-house in a
+neighboring street. She had come from some up-State country town, and
+her bureaus and bedsteads were barely enough to furnish the small,
+old-fashioned house which she took for a term of years. Miss Jamison was
+a genius&mdash;a genius of the type peculiar to the age in which we live. She
+wasn't the "slob" that she looked. The epithet is not mine, but that of
+the young gentleman to whom I am indebted for this information. No,
+indeed; Miss Jamison was anything but a "slob," as one soon found out
+who had occasion to deal with her very long. A shrewd, exacting,
+penny-for-penny and dollar-for-dollar business woman was concealed under
+the mask of her good-natured face and air of motherly solicitude. Miss
+Jamison, at the very start-out of her career, was inspired to call her
+little "snide" boarding-house after the founder of the particular creed
+professed by the congregation of the neighboring church. The result was
+that "The Calvin" immediately became filled with homeless Presbyterians,
+or the homeless friends and acquaintances of Presbyterians. They not
+only filled her house, but they overflowed, and to preserve the overflow
+Miss Jamison rented the adjoining house.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p><p>Miss Jamison was now a successful boarding-house keeper on a scale
+large enough to have satisfied the aspirations of a less clever woman.
+But she longed for other denominations to feed and house. Of the
+assortment that offered themselves, she chose the Methodists next, and
+soon had several flourishing houses running under the pious appellation
+"Wesley," which name, memorialized in large black letters on a brass
+sign, soon became a veritable magnet to board-seeking Methodism.</p>
+
+<p>The third and last venture of the energetic lady, and the one from which
+she was to derive her largest percentage of revenue, was the
+establishment of the place of which I had so recently become an inmate.
+Of all three of Miss Jamison's boarding-houses, this was the largest and
+withal the cheapest and most democratic: in which characteristics it but
+partook of the nature of the particular sort of church-going public it
+wished to attract, which was none other than the heterodox element which
+flocked in vast numbers to All People's church. The All People's edifice
+was a big, unsightly brick building. It had been originally designed for
+a roller-skating rink.</p>
+
+<p>All People's, as the church was colloquially named, was one of the most
+popular places of worship in the city. Every Sunday, both at morning and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>evening services, the big rink was packed to the doors with people who
+were attracted quite as much by the good music as they were by the
+popular preaching of the very popular divine. A large percentage of this
+great congregation was recruited from the transient element of
+population which lives in lodgings and boarding-houses. From its
+democracy and lack of all ceremony, it was a church which appealed
+particularly to those who were without ties or affiliations. Into this
+sanctuary the lonely young man (or girl) of a church-going temperament
+was almost sure to drift sooner or later if his probationary period of
+strangerhood happened to fall in this section of the city.</p>
+
+<p>The clever Miss Jamison put a sign bearing the legend, "All People's,"
+on each of the doors of six houses, opposite the church, which she
+acquired one by one as her business increased. The homeless and lonely
+who came to All People's for spiritual refreshment, or to gratify their
+curiosity, remained to patronize Miss Jamison's "special Sunday"
+thirty-five-cent table d'h&ocirc;te, served in the basement of one house; or
+bought a meal-ticket for four dollars, which entitled them to twenty-one
+meals served in the basement of another of the houses; or for the sum of
+five dollars and upward insured themselves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> the privilege of a week's
+lodging and three meals a day served in still another of the basements.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the history of Miss Jamison as detailed at the breakfast-table
+that Sunday morning.</p>
+
+<p>I went out for a walk late in the afternoon, and wandered about,
+homesick and lonely. When I returned dinner was over and the dining-room
+almost deserted, only a few remaining to gossip over their dessert and
+coffee. At my table all had gone save the young girl with the dark eyes,
+who, I felt instinctively, was a very nice and agreeable girl. As I
+approached the table, she raised her eyes from the book she was reading
+and gave me a diffident little bow, when, seeing I was so glad to
+respond to it, she immediately smiled in a friendly way.</p>
+
+<p>From the glimpse I had caught of her during the morning meal, I had
+thought her very pretty in a smart, stiffly starched, mannish-looking
+shirt-waist. That night she looked even prettier, clad in a
+close-fitting cloth gown of dark wine-color. I noticed, too, as I sat
+down beside her, that she was an unusually big woman.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you like the boarding-house by this time?" she asked, with an
+encouraging smile, to which I responded as approvingly as I could in the
+remembrance of the cheerless hall bedroom far above,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> and in the
+presence of the unappetizing dinner spread before me.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I think it's rotten, if you'll excuse my French," laughed Miss
+Plympton, as she cut a square of butter off the common dish and passed
+it to me. "And I guess you think so, too, only you're too polite to
+roast the grub like the rest of us do. But you'll get over that in time.
+I was just the same way when I first begun living in boarding-houses,
+but I've got bravely over that now.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been here just a little over a week myself," she went on in her
+frank and engaging manner. "I saw you this morning, and I just knew how
+you felt. I thought I'd die of homesickness when I came. Not a soul
+spoke to me for four days. Not that anybody would want to particularly
+get acquainted with these cattle, only I'm one of the sort that has got
+to have somebody to speak to. So this morning I said to myself, when I
+saw you, that I'd put on nerve and up and speak to you even if you did
+turn me down. And that's why I waited for you to-night."</p>
+
+<p>I responded that I was glad she had been so informal; absence of
+formality being the meaning I interpreted from her slang, which was much
+more up-to-date and much more vigorous than that to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> which I had been
+accustomed in the speech of a small country village. As I ate, we
+talked. We talked a little about a great many things in which we were
+not at all interested, and a very great deal about ourselves and the
+hazards of fortune which had brought our lives together and crossed them
+thus at Miss Jamison's supper-table,&mdash;subjects into which we entered
+with all the zest and happy egotism of youth. Of this egotism I had the
+greater preponderance, probably because of my three or four years' less
+experience of life. Before we rose from the table I had told Miss
+Plympton the story of my life as it had been lived thus far.</p>
+
+<p>Of her own story, all I knew was that she was a Westerner, that she had
+worked a while in Chicago, and had come to New York on a mission similar
+to my own&mdash;to look for a job. We went together to her room, which was as
+small and shabby as my own, and a few minutes later we were sitting
+round the little Jenny Lind stove, listening to the pleasant crackle of
+the freshly kindled fire. Both were silent for a few minutes. Then my new friend spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"What does that put you in mind of?" she asked slowly.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean the crackle of the kindling-wood and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> the snap of the coal as
+the flames begin to lick it?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"U-m-m, yes; the crackle of the wood and the snap of the coal," said the
+girl in a dreamy tone.</p>
+
+<p>"Home!" I cried, quick as a flash. "It makes me think of home&mdash;of the
+home I used to have," and my eyes blurred.</p>
+
+<p>"Here, too! Home!" she replied softly. "Funny, isn't it, that we have so
+many ideas exactly alike? But I suppose that's because we were both
+brought up in the country."</p>
+
+<p>"In the country!" I exclaimed in surprise. "I thought you were from Chicago."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no; I'm from the country. I didn't go to Chicago till I was twenty.
+I lived all my life on a farm in Iowa, till I went up to get a job in
+Chicago after my father died and I was all alone in the world. We lived
+in the very wildest part of the State&mdash;in the part they call the 'Big
+Woods.' Oh, I know all about frontier life. And there's hardly any kind
+of 'roughing it' that I haven't done. I was born to it."</p>
+
+<p>She laughed, opening the stove door, for the elbow of the pipe was now
+red-hot and threatening conflagration to the thin board partition
+behind, which divided the little room from that of the next lodger.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p><p>A loud thump upon the board partition startled us. We listened for a
+few moments,&mdash;at first with alarm,&mdash;and then realized that the noise was
+only the protest of a sleepy boarder.</p>
+
+<p>Presently, as we continued to talk, the banging of a shoe-heel on the
+wall grew more insistent. We heard doors opening along the hall, and a
+high, raucous voice invoked quiet in none too polite phrase. So I said,
+"Good night," in a whisper and tiptoed to my own door.</p>
+
+<p>Thus began my acquaintance with Minnie Plympton&mdash;an acquaintance which,
+ripening later into a warm friendship, was to have an incalculable
+influence upon my life.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>II</h2>
+
+<h3>IN WHICH I START OUT IN QUEST OF WORK</h3>
+
+<p>When I woke up the next morning it was to find a weight of homesickness
+lying heavy upon my heart&mdash;homesickness for something which, alas! no
+longer existed save in memory. Then I remembered the girl on the floor
+below, and soon I was dressing with a light heart, eager to hurry down
+to breakfast. I was somewhat disappointed to find that she had eaten her
+breakfast and gone. I went out upon the stoop, hailed a newsboy, and
+sought my skylight bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>It was with a hope born of youth and inexperience that I now gave
+systematic attention to "<span class="smcap">Help Wanted</span>&mdash;Female." I will confess that at
+first I was ambitious to do only what I chose to esteem "lady-like"
+employment. I had taught one winter in the village school back home, and
+my pride and intelligence naturally prompted me to a desire to do
+something in which I could use my head, my tongue, my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> wits&mdash;anything,
+in fact, rather than my hands. The advertisements I answered all held
+out inducements of genteel or semi-genteel nature&mdash;ladies' companions;
+young women to read aloud to blind gentlemen and to invalids; assistants
+in doctors' and dentists' offices, and for the reception-room of
+photograph galleries. All of them requested answers in "own handwriting,
+by mail only." I replied to scores of such with no success.</p>
+
+<p>There was also another kind of illusive advertisement which I answered
+in prodigal numbers in the greenness of these early days. These were
+those deceitfully worded requests for "bright, intelligent ladies&mdash;no
+canvassing." And not less prodigal were the returns I got. They came in
+avalanches by every mail, from patent-medicine concerns,
+subscription-book publishers, novelty manufacturers&mdash;all in search of
+canvassers to peddle their trash.</p>
+
+<p>I might have saved much superfluous effort, and saved myself many
+postage-stamps, had I been fortunate enough to have had the advice of
+Miss Plympton throughout this first week. But Miss Plympton had gone
+away for several days. I had not seen her since we had parted on Sunday
+night; but Monday evening, when I went to the table, I found a hasty
+note saying she had gone out of town to see about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> a job, and would see
+me later. That was all. I found myself longing for her more and more as
+the week wore away.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, however, I did not allow the sentiment of an interrupted
+acquaintance to interfere with my quest for a job, nor did I sit idle in
+Miss Jamison's boarding-house waiting for replies. I had only a few
+dollars in the world, and on the other side of those few dollars I saw
+starvation staring me in the face unless I found work very soon. I
+planned my search for work as systematically as I might have conducted a
+house-cleaning. As soon as each day's grist of "wants" was sifted and a
+certain quota disposed of by letter, I set out to make personal
+applications to such as required it. This I found to be an even more
+discouraging business than the epistolary process, as it was bitterly
+cold and the streets were filled with slush and snow. The distances were
+interminable, and each day found my little hoard dwindling away with
+frightful rapidity into innumerable car-fares and frequent cups of
+coffee at wayside lunch-counters. I traveled over miles and miles of
+territory, by trolley-car, by elevated train and ferry-boat, to
+Brooklyn, to Harlem, to Jersey City and Newark, only to reach my
+destination cold and hungry, and to be interviewed by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> a seedy man with
+a patent stove-lifter, a shirt-waist belt, a contrivance for holding up
+a lady's train, or a new-fangled mop&mdash;anything, everything that a
+persistent agent might sell to the spendthrift wife of an American workingman.</p>
+
+<p>By the end of the week I was obliged to hunt for another boarding-house
+as well as continue the search for work. My little bedroom under the
+skylight, and three meals per day of none too plentiful and wretchedly
+cooked food, required the deposit of five dollars a week in advance.
+With but a few dollars left in my purse, and the prospect of work still
+far off, nothing in the world seemed so desirable as that I might be
+able to pass the remainder of my days in Miss Jamison's house, and that
+I might be able to breakfast indefinitely in her dark basement dining-room.</p>
+
+<p>Sunday morning came around again. I had been a week in the city, and was
+apparently no nearer to earning a livelihood than the day I started out.
+I had gained a little experience, but it had been at the cost of nearly
+five precious dollars, all spent in street-car fare and postage-stamps;
+of miles and miles of walking through muddy, slushy streets; and at the
+sacrifice of my noon lunch, which I could have had done up for me at the
+boarding-house without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> extra charge, but which my silly vanity did not
+allow me to carry around under my arm.</p>
+
+<p>Sunday morning again, and still no Miss Plympton. She was under
+discussion when I reached the breakfast-table. The lady with the
+cataract and her friend were speaking of how well she always dressed,
+and one of them wondered how she managed to do it, since she had no
+visible means of support. Dr. Perkins didn't seem to relish the turn the
+conversation had taken, and suddenly he fell completely out of it. But
+the gossips clacked on regardless, until they were brought to a
+standstill by a peremptory exclamation from the end of the table.</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me," spoke up the doctor, dryly, "but I'll have to ask you to
+change the subject. You are talking about a young lady of whom you know
+absolutely nothing!"</p>
+
+<p>The scandal-mongers finished breakfast in silence and soon shuffled away
+in their bedroom slippers.</p>
+
+<p>"Old cats!" said the doctor, energetically. "Boarding-house life breeds
+them. A boarding-house is no place for anybody. It perverts all the
+natural instincts, mental, moral, and physical. You'd hardly believe it,
+but I've lived in boarding-houses so long that I can't digest really
+wholesome food any more."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span></p><p>When at last we rose to go, he handed me a card upon which I later read
+this astonishing inscription in heavy black type: "<span class="smcap">Painless Perkins</span>";
+and, in smaller type underneath, the information that the extracting or
+filling of molars; crown and bridge work; or the fitting of artificial
+teeth, would be done by Painless Perkins in a "Particularly Pleasing
+Way," and that he was "Predisposed to Popular Prices."</p>
+
+<p>With no books to read, and no advertisements to answer, and no friend
+with whom to gossip, the day stretched before me a weary, dreary waste,
+when I happened to think of the church across the way, something of the
+history of which I had heard from Painless Perkins. And so I joined the
+crowd of strangers who were pouring into the doors of "All People's" to
+the music of a sweet-toned bell.</p>
+
+<p>I was there early, but the auditorium was packed, and I was ushered to a
+camp-chair in the aisle. The crowd was not suggestive of fashionable New
+York, though there were present many fine-looking, well-groomed men and
+women. But nearly everybody was neatly and decently if not well dressed.
+Many of the faces looked as sad and lonely as I felt. They appeared to
+be strangers&mdash;homeless wanderers who had come here to church not so much
+for worship<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> as to come in touch with human beings. I was too tired, too
+discouraged even to hear what the earnest-voiced preacher said. The two
+girls sitting directly in front of me listened intently, as they passed
+a little bag of peppermints back and forth, and I envied them the
+friendship which that furtive bag of peppermints betokened. If I had had
+any prospect of getting a job the following week, I too could have
+listened to the preacher. As it was, my ears were attuned only to the
+terrifying refrain which had haunted me all week: "<span class="smcap">Work or Starve, Work
+or Starve</span>!" After a while I tried to rouse myself and to take in the
+sermon which was holding the great congregation breathless. It was about
+the Good Samaritan. I heard a few sentences. Then the preacher's voice
+was lost once more in that insistent refrain.</p>
+
+<p>Dinner at noon and supper in the evening in the dark house across the
+street, and still my friend was absent. The scandal-mongers were as busy
+as ever, for Painless Perkins was away.</p>
+
+<p>Monday morning I made my way eastward on foot, across Union Square. The
+snow had been falling all night and was still sifting down in big,
+flowery flakes. The trees under their soft, feathery burdens looked like
+those that grow only in a child's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> picture-book. The slat-benches were
+covered with soft white blankets that were as yet undisturbed, for the
+habitual bench tramp was not abroad so early in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>I was up extraordinarily early, as I started out on a double search. The
+first item on my list&mdash;"Board and room, good neighborhood, $3.00"&mdash;took
+me south across Fourteenth Street, choked and congested with the morning
+traffic. The pavements were filled with hurrying crowds&mdash;factory-hands,
+mill-girls, mechanics&mdash;the vanguard of the great labor army. I hunted
+for Mrs. McGinniss's residence in a street which pays little attention
+to the formality of numbers. An interview with a milk-cart driver
+brought the discouraging news that I might find it somewhere between
+First and Second avenues, and I hurried on down the street, which
+stretched away and dipped in the far distance under the framework of the
+elevated railroad. The stoop-line on either side presented an
+interminable vista of small, squalid shops, meat-markets, and saloons.</p>
+
+<p>Wedged between a paper-box factory and a blacksmith's shop I found Mrs.
+McGinniss's number. It was a five-story red-brick tenement, like all the
+others that rise above the stoop-line of this poverty-stricken street. A
+soiled scrap of paper pasted beneath the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> button informed possible
+visitors that Mrs. McGinniss lived on the fifth floor, that her bell was
+out of order, and that one should "Push Guggenheim's."</p>
+
+<p>The Guggenheims responded with a click from above. I ascended a flight
+of dark stairs, at the top of which there was ranged an ambuscade of
+numerous small Guggenheims who had gushed out in their underdrawers and
+petticoats. Their mother, in curl-papers, gave explicit directions for my guidance upward.</p>
+
+<p>"Is this where Mrs. McGinniss lives?" I inquired of the dropsical
+slattern who responded to my rap.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm her."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. McGinniss's manner was aggressive. Conscious of her bare, sodden
+arms and dripping gingham apron, she evidently supposed I had mistaken
+her for a laundress instead of the lady of her own house, and she showed
+her resentment by chilly reticence.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't run no boarding-house, and I don't take just any trash that
+come along, either."</p>
+
+<p>I agreed that these were excellent qualities in a landlady, and then,
+somewhat mollified, she led the way through a steamy passage into a
+stuffy bedroom. It had one window, looking out into an air-shaft filled
+with lines of fluttering garments and a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> network of fire-escapes. A
+slat-bed, a bureau, a washstand with a noseless pitcher, and a
+much-spotted Brussels carpet completed the furnishings, and out of all
+exuded ancient odors of boiled cabbage and soap-suds.</p>
+
+<p>"There's one thing, though, I won't stand for, and that's cigarettes.
+I've had the last girl in my house that smokes cigarettes I'm going to
+have. Look at that nice carpet! Look at it! All burned full of holes
+where that trollop throwed her matches."</p>
+
+<p>I hurried away, with a polite promise to consider the McGinniss accommodations.</p>
+
+<p>The abode of Mrs. Cunningham was but a few blocks away. Mrs. Cunningham
+did not live in a flat, but in the comparative gentility of "up-stairs
+rooms" over a gaudy undertaking establishment. She proved to be an Irish
+lady with a gin-laden breath. Her eyes were blue and bleared, and looked
+in kindly fashion through a pair of large-rimmed and much-mended
+spectacles, from which one of the glasses had totally disappeared. She
+was affable, and responded to my questions with almost maudlin
+tenderness, calling me "dearie" throughout the interview. Her little
+parlor was hung with chromo reproductions of great religious paintings,
+and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> close atmosphere was redolent of the heavy perfume of lilies
+and stale tuberoses. Remarking the unusual prodigality of flowers, the
+good lady explained that the undertaker beneath was in the habit of
+showing his esteem by the daily tender of such funeral decorations as
+had served their purpose. Mrs. Cunningham's accommodations at four
+dollars per week were beyond my purse, however; but, as she was willing
+to talk all day, my exit was made with difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>The remainder of that day and a good part of the days that followed were
+spent in interviewing all manner of landladies, most of whom, like Mrs.
+McGinniss's bell, were disordered physically or mentally. Heartsick, I
+decided by Saturday to take blind chances with the janitress of a
+Fourteenth-street lodging-house. She had a cleft palate, and all I could
+understand of her mutilated talk was that the room would be one dollar a
+week with "light-housekeeping" privileges thrown in. I had either to pay
+Miss Jamison another five dollars that next morning or take chances
+here. I took the hazard, paid the necessary one dollar to the more or
+less inarticulate woman, and went back to Miss Jamison's to get my
+baggage and to eat the one dinner that was still due me&mdash;not forgetting
+to leave a little note for the still absent Minnie Plympton, giving her my new address.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>III</h2>
+
+<h3>I TRY "LIGHT" HOUSEKEEPING IN A FOURTEENTH-STREET LODGING-HOUSE</h3>
+
+<p>Bedtime found me thoroughly settled in my new quarters, and myself in
+quite an optimistic frame of mind as I drew close to the most fearfully
+and wonderfully mutilated little cook-stove that ever cheered the heart
+of a lonely Fourteenth-street "light housekeeper." In the red-hot glow
+of its presence, and with the inspiring example of courage and fortitude
+which it presented, how could I have felt otherwise than optimistic? It
+was such a tiny mite of a stove, and it seemed to have had such a world
+of misfortune and bad luck! There was something whimsically, almost
+pathetically, human about it. This, it so pleased my fancy to believe,
+was because of the sufferings it had borne. Its little body cracked and
+warped and rust-eaten, the isinglass lights in its door long since
+punched out by the ruthless poker, the door itself swung to on the
+broken hinge by a twisted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> nail&mdash;a brave, bright, merry little cripple
+of a stove, standing on short wooden legs. I made the interesting
+discovery that it was a stove of the feminine persuasion; "Little
+Lottie" was the name which I spelled out in the broken letters that it
+wore across its glowing heart. And straightway Little Lottie became more
+human than ever&mdash;poor Little Lottie, the one solitary bright and
+cheerful object within these four smoke-grimed walls which I had elected to make my home.</p>
+
+<p>Home! The tears started at the mere recollection of the word. The
+firelight that flickered through the broken door showed an ironical
+contrast between the home that now was and that which once had been, and
+to which I looked back with such loving thoughts that night. A narrow
+wooden bedstead, as battered and crippled as Little Lottie, but without
+the latter's air of sympathy and companionship; a tremulous kitchen
+table; a long box set on end and curtained off with a bit of faded
+calico, a single chair with a mended leg&mdash;these rude conveniences
+comprised my total list of housekeeping effects, not forgetting, of
+course, the dish-pan, the stubby broom, and the coal-scuttle, along with
+the scanty assortment of thick, chipped dishes and the pots and pans on
+the shelf behind the calico curtain. There was no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> bureau, only a waved
+bit of looking-glass over the sink in the corner. My wardrobe was strung
+along the row of nails behind the door, a modest array of petticoats and
+skirts and shirt-waists, with a winter coat and a felt sailor-hat.
+Beneath them, set at right angles to the corner, was the little
+old-fashioned swell-top trunk, which precaution prompted me to drag
+before the door. It had been my mother's trunk, and this was the first
+journey it had made since it carried her bridal finery to and from the
+Philadelphia Centennial. In the quiet, uneventful years that followed it
+had reposed in a big, roomy old garret, undisturbed save at the annual
+spring house-cleaning, or when we children played "The Mistletoe Bough"
+and hid in it the skeleton which had descended to us as a relic of our
+grandfather's student days.</p>
+
+<p>What a change for the little old trunk and what a change for me the last
+twelve months had brought about! After the door had been further
+barricaded by piling the chair on top of the trunk, and the coal-scuttle
+on top of the chair, I blew out the evil-smelling lamp and crept with
+fear and trembling into a most inhospitable-looking bed. It received my
+slight weight with a groan, and creaked dismally every time I stirred.
+Through the thin mattress I could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> feel the slats, that seemed hard
+bands of pain across my tired body.</p>
+
+<p>From where I was lying I could look straight into Little Lottie's heart,
+now a steady, glowing mass of coals. Little Lottie invited me to
+retrospection. How different it all was in reality from what I had
+imagined it would be! In the story-books it is always so alluring&mdash;this
+coming to a great city to seek one's fortune. A year ago I had been
+teaching in a little school-house among my Pennsylvania hills, and I
+recalled now, very vividly, how I used to love, on just such cold winter
+nights as this, when the wind whistled at every keyhole of the
+farm-house where I boarded during the school year to pull my
+rocking-chair into the chimney-corner and read magazine stories about
+girls who lived in hall bedrooms on little or nothing a week; and of
+what good times they had, or seemed to have, with never being quite
+certain where the next meal was to come from, or whether it was to come
+at all.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>I was wakened by the rattle of dishes, the clatter of pots and pans, and
+the rancid odor of frying bacon, bespeaking the fact that somebody's
+breakfast was under way in the next room to mine. I stepped across the
+bare, cold floor to the window,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> and, rolling up the sagging
+black-muslin blind, looked out upon the world. Bleak and unbeautiful was
+the prospect that presented itself through the interstices of the spiral
+fire-escape&mdash;a narrow vista strung with clothes-lines and buttressed all
+about with the rear walls of high, gaunt, tottering tenements, the dirty
+windows of which were filled with frowzy-headed women and children.
+Something interesting was going on below, for in a moment every window
+was thrown up, and a score of heads leaned far out. I followed suit.</p>
+
+<p>In the sloppy, slush-filled courtyard below two untidy women were
+engaged in coarse vituperation that shortly led to blows. The window
+next to mine was quickly raised, and I drew back to escape being
+included in the category of curious spectators to this disgraceful
+scene&mdash;but too late.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the row?" a voice asked with friendly familiarity. It was the
+girl who had been frying the bacon, and she still held a greasy knife in
+her hand. I answered that I did not know. She was very young, hardly
+more than sixteen. She had a coarse, bold, stupid face, topped by a
+heavy black pompadour that completely concealed any forehead she might
+be supposed to possess. She was decidedly an ill-looking girl; but the
+young fellow in his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>shirt-sleeves who now stuck his head out of the
+window alongside of hers was infinitely more so. He had a weak face,
+covered with pimples, and the bridge of his nose was broken; but,
+despite these manifest facial defects, and notwithstanding the squalor
+of his surroundings, a very high collar and a red necktie gave him the
+unmistakable air of the cheap dandy. Again I gave a civil evasion to the
+girl's trivial question, and as I did so her companion, looking over her
+frowzy pompadour, stared at me with insolent familiarity. I jerked my
+head in hurriedly, and, shutting the window, turned my attention to
+Little Lottie. It was not long before my tea-kettle was singing merrily.
+I was about to sit down to the first meal in my new abode, when an
+insinuating rat-tat sounded on the door. I opened it to find the
+ill-looking young fellow leaning languidly against the door-jamb, a
+cigarette between his teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you wish?" I asked, in my most matter-of-fact manner.</p>
+
+<p>He puffed some smoke in my face, then took the cigarette from his mouth
+and looked at me, evidently at a loss for an answer.</p>
+
+<p>"The girl in there wants to know if you'll loan her one of your plates,"
+he replied at last.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry," I said, with freezing politeness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>&mdash;"I am very sorry, but I
+have only one plate, and I'll need that myself," and I closed the door.</p>
+
+<p>After breakfast I walked up to First Avenue to lay in my provisions for
+the day&mdash;a loaf of bread, a quart of potatoes, a quarter of a pound of
+butter, and two cents' worth of milk. Never in my life before had I
+bought anything on the Sabbath day, and never before had I seen a place
+of business open for trade on that day. My people had not been sternly
+religious people, and, theoretically, I didn't think I was doing
+anything wicked; yet I felt, as I gave my order to the groceryman, as
+though I were violating every sacred tradition of birth and breeding.
+After that I tried to do all necessary marketing the day before, and if
+I needed anything on Sunday I made myself go without it.</p>
+
+<p>Returning with my unholy provisions tucked under my arm and a
+broken-nosed blue pitcher deftly concealed under my protecting cape, I
+made my first daylight inventory of that block of Fourteenth Street
+where I lived. On each corner stood a gaudy saloon, surmounted by a
+Raines law hotel. It seemed to have been at one time the abode of
+fashion, for though both ends of the block were supported by business
+buildings, the entire middle presented a solid front of brownstone,
+broken at intervals by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> long flights of steps leading to handsome,
+though long-neglected black-walnut doors. The basements were given over to trade.</p>
+
+<p>On the stairs I was brought face to face again with my sinister-looking
+young man. I looked straight ahead, so as to avoid his eyes. But I found
+the way blocked, as he stretched his arms from banister to wall.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter with you?" he began coaxingly. "Say, I'll take you to
+the theater, if you want to go. What do you say to 'The Jolly Grass
+Widows' to-morrow night?"</p>
+
+<p>Thoroughly frightened, I responded to the unwarranted invitation by
+retreating two steps down the stairs, whereupon the young ruffian jumped
+down and grasped the arm in which I held my packages. I don't know what
+nerved me up to such a heroic defense, but in the twinkling of an eye he
+fell sprawling down the stairs, followed by the flying remnants of my
+landlady's milk-pitcher. Then I ran up the remaining two flights as fast
+as my feet would carry me, and landed in the midst of an altercation
+between the inarticulate landlady and my girl neighbor. In passing, I
+could make out enough of the wrangle to understand that the latter was
+being ordered out of the house.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p><p>When quietness had been restored, there was a tap at my door. I
+demanded the name of my visitor in as brave a voice as I could command.
+"Mrs. Pringle," returned the broken voice of the landlady. I saw, when I
+opened the door, that she wanted to talk to me. I also saw, what I had
+not noticed in my hasty interview the night before, that she was
+superior to most of the women of her class. She had been grimy and
+unkempt the night before, after her long week's work of sweeping and
+cleaning and coal-carrying; but to-day, in her clean wrapper and smooth
+gray hair, there was a pathetic Sabbath-day air of cleanliness about her
+spare, bent figure. Somehow, I felt that she would not be so very angry
+when I explained about the pitcher, and I invited her in with genuine cordiality.</p>
+
+<p>She listened in silence to my story, her knotted hands folded upon her
+starched gingham apron.</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right!" she replied, a smile lighting up her tired face.
+"I'm just glad you broke the pitcher over that vile fellow's head."</p>
+
+<p>"You know him, then?" I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. "No, I don't know him, but I know the bad lot he
+belongs to. I've just warned this girl in here to leave as soon as she
+can pack her things. I gave her back her rent-money. She only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> come day
+afore yesterday, and I supposed she was an honest working-girl or I'd
+never have took her. She pretended to me she was a skirt-hand, and it
+turns out she's nothin' but a common trollop. And I hated to turn her
+out, too, even if she did talk back to me something awful. She can't be
+more 'n sixteen; but, somehow or t' other, when a girl like that goes to
+be bad, there ain't no use trying to reason 'em out of it. You come from
+the country, don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a kindly curiosity mirrored in the dim, sunken eyes which
+surveyed me steadily, a lingering accent of repressed tenderness in her
+voice, and I did not deem it beneath my dignity to tell this decent,
+motherly soul my little story.</p>
+
+<p>She listened attentively. "I knowed you were a well-brought-up young
+woman the moment I laid eyes on you," she began, the maimed words
+falling gently from her lips, despite the high, cracked voice in which
+they were spoken. "And I knowed you was from the country, too; so I did.
+You don't mind, honey, do you, if I speak sort of plain with you, being
+as I'm an old woman and you just a slip of a girl? Do you, now?"</p>
+
+<p>I replied that she might speak just as plainly as she liked with me and
+I would take no offense, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> then she smiled approvingly upon me and
+drew her little checked breakfast-shawl closer about her sunken bosom.</p>
+
+<p>"I like to hear you say that," she went on, "because so many girls won't
+listen to a word of advice&mdash;least of all when it comes from an old woman
+that they thinks don't know as much as they does. They don't relish
+being told how careful they ought to be about the people they get
+acquainted with. Now I'm talking to you just as if you was one of my
+own. You may think you are wise, and all that,&mdash;and you are a bright
+sort of girl, I'll give you credit for that, only this is such a wicked
+city. A young girl like you, with no folks of her own to go to when
+she's discouraged and blue, 'll find plenty and to spare that'll be
+willing to lead her off. This is a bad neighborhood you're in, and you
+got to be mighty careful about yourself. Forewarned is forearmed, as
+you've heard tell before; and I have saw so many young girls go wrong
+that I felt could have been saved if somebody had just up and talked
+straight at them in the beginning, like I'm talking here to you. I had a
+girl here in this house two years agone. A pretty girl she was, and she
+was from the country too. Somewheres up in Connecticut she come from.
+She was a nice, innocent girl too, so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> she was, when she come here to
+rent a room. This very room you've got was the one she had. Just as
+quiet and modest and respectful spoken to her elders as you are, she
+was. She worked down in St. Mark's Place. She was a cap-maker and got
+four dollars a week. She started out to live honest, for she'd been
+brought up decent. Her father, she told me when she come here, was a
+blacksmith in some of them little country towns up there. She thought
+she could make lots of money to come down here to work, and that she
+could have a fine time; and I guess she was terrible disappointed when
+she found just how things really was. She hankered for fine clothes and
+to go to theaters, and there wasn't any chanst for neither on four
+dollars a week. By and by, though, she did get to going out some with a
+young fellow that worked where she did. He was a nice, decent young
+fellow, and I'll warrant you she could have married him if she had acted
+wise and sensible; and he'd like as not have made her a good provider. I
+don't blame the men out and out, as some folks do; and I say that when a
+young fellow sees that a girl 'll let him act free with her, he just
+says to himself she'll let other fellows act free with her, and then he
+don't want to marry her, no difference how much he might have thought of
+her to begin with.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> That's what, I think, started this girl going wrong.
+At first he'd just bring her to the door when they'd be out to the
+theater, but by and by she got to taking him up to her room. Now it's
+none of my business to interfere with people's comings and goings in
+this house, being as I'm only the janitress. I have my orders from the
+boss&mdash;who's a real nice sort of man&mdash;to only rent rooms to respectable
+people, and to put anybody out where I knows there's bad conduct going
+on. He's strong on morals, the boss is. He used to be a saloon-keeper,
+and the Salvation Army converted him; and then he sold out and went into
+this business. He has this place, and then he has a boarding-house on
+Second Avenue. These Germans are awful kind men, when they are kind, and
+Mr. Schneider has did a lot of good. If any of his tenants get sick and
+can't pay their rent, or if they get out of work, he don't bounce them
+into the street, but he just tells them to stay on and pay him when they
+get caught up; and would you believe it that he never loses a cent, either!"</p>
+
+<p>Here the woman stopped for breath, which gave me an opportunity to turn
+the channel of her talk back to the girl from Connecticut.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I didn't have no right to tell the girl that she mustn't take her
+gentleman friend to her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> room, because there ain't no law again it in
+any light-housekeeping rooms. The people who live here are all
+working-people and earn their livings; and they've got a right to do as
+they please so they're quiet and respectable. But I took it on myself to
+kind of let the girl understand that her beau would think more of her if
+she just dropped him at the front door. A man 'll always pick a spunky,
+independent girl that sort of keeps him at a stand-off every time,
+anyway. She looked sort of miffed when I said this, and then I said that
+she could set up with him any time she wanted in my sitting-room in the
+basement, what is real comfortable furnished and pretty-looking&mdash;and
+which you too is perfectly welcome to bring any gentleman company to any time you've a mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she looked at me sort of scornful, and answered me real
+peart-like, and said she guessed she could take care of herself. She
+tossed her head in a pretty taking way she had, and walked down-stairs,
+as though I had turribly insulted her; so what could I do?"</p>
+
+<p>Again she paused, panting for breath in short, wheezy gasps.</p>
+
+<p>"And what became of her at last?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"What became of her!" she echoed. "What<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> becomes of all of 'em?" and she
+jerked her head significantly in the vague direction of the street. "She
+left soon after that, though I never said another word to her, but just
+kept on bidding her the time of day, as if nothing had ever passed
+between us. I felt turrible about her leaving, too; and I tried to
+persuade her she was making a mistake by leaving a house that she knowed
+was decent and where she could manage to live within her means. Oh, you
+don't know how I felt for days and weeks after she went. I knew how good
+she was when she come to this house, and I kept thinking how my Annie
+might have been just as foolish and heedless if she'd been throwed
+amongst strangers and had the same temptations. I don't know where she
+went exactly. She didn't give me much satisfaction about it, and I never
+seen her again, till one morning this winter, when I went out to bring
+in my ash-cans, I run right into her. It was real early in the morning,
+just getting daylight. I always get up at five o'clock winter and
+summer, because I'm used to it; and then I've got to, so's to get the
+work done, for I can't work fast with my rheumatics. It was hardly light
+enough yet for me to recognize her right away, and she did look so
+forlorn and pitiful-like walking there so early in the morning in the
+snow. It had snowed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> in the night, and it was the first we'd had this
+season. She didn't see me at first. She was walking slow,&mdash;real slow and
+lingering-like,&mdash;like them poor things do. I was standing at the top of
+the stairs in the areaway, and her face was turned across the street, as
+if she was expecting somebody. I tried to speak to her, but sometimes
+something catches me when I'm strong moved and I can't sound a word for
+several moments. And that's the way I was struck that morning. I started
+to run after her; then I thought better of it, and sort of guessed she'd
+turn around at the corner and come back. So I went to the cans and made
+believe to be turrible interested in them, and when I looked up, sure
+enough she had started back again, and I had caught her eye.</p>
+
+<p>"Thinking of Annie, I bade her the time of day real friendly-like, just
+as though everything was all right, and I asked her to come in and have
+a bite of breakfast. I'd left the coffee on the stove, and had fried
+myself a nice mess of onions. She looked sort of half shamed and half
+grateful, and had started to come with me, when all of a sudden she
+stopped and said she guessed she couldn't that morning. Then she
+strolled off again. I picked up my ash-cans and started down-stairs, but
+I wasn't half-way down when I saw her hurrying along the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> other side of
+the street with a man I'd seen come round the corner by Skelly's saloon
+while we was talking together. And I never saw her again."</p>
+
+<p>An expression of pathos, infinitely sweet and tender, had crept into the
+woman's thin, worn face&mdash;an expression in strange, almost ludicrous,
+contrast to the high, cracked voice in which the talc had been
+delivered. I gazed at the bent old creature with something like
+reverence for the nobility which I now could read so plainly in every
+line of her face&mdash;the nobility which can attach itself only to decency
+of life and thought and action. In my brief interview with her in the
+twilight of the evening before I had heard only the ridiculous jargon of
+a woman without a palate, and I had seen only an old crone with a
+soot-smeared face. But now the maimed voice echoed in my ears like the
+sound of the little old melodeon with the broken strings&mdash;which had been my mother's.</p>
+
+<p>"I must be going now," she said, rising with an effort. "You'll come
+down and see me sometimes, won't you, honey? I like young people. They
+sort of cheer me up when I feel down. Come down this afternoon, if you
+haven't got any place to go. Come down and I'll lend you some books."</p>
+
+<p>I thanked her, and promised I would.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>WHEREIN FATE BRINGS ME GOOD FORTUNE IN ONE HAND AND DISASTER IN THE OTHER</h3>
+
+<p>Monday morning&mdash;a cheerless, bleak Monday morning, with the rain falling
+upon the slush-filled streets. I ate a hurried breakfast of bread and
+butter and black coffee, locked my door, and started out with renewed
+vigor to look for a job. I had learned by this time to use a little
+discrimination in answering advertisements; and from now on I paid
+attention to such prospective employers only as stated the nature of
+their business and gave a street number.</p>
+
+<p>I had also learned another important thing, and that was that I could
+not afford to be too particular about the nature of my job, as I watched
+my small capital diminish day by day, despite my frugality. I would have
+been glad, now, to get work at anything that promised the chance of a
+meager livelihood. Anything to get a foothold. The chief obstacle seemed
+to be my inexperience. I could obtain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> plenty of work which in time
+promised to pay me five dollars a week, but in the two or three months'
+time necessary to acquire dexterity I should have starved to death, for
+I had not money to carry me over this critical period.</p>
+
+<p>Work was plenty enough. It nearly always is so. The question was not how
+to get a job, but how to live by such jobs as I could get. The low wages
+offered to green hands&mdash;two and a half to three dollars a week&mdash;might do
+for the girl who lived at home; but I had to pay room-rent and car-fare
+and to buy food. So, as long as my small capital could be made to hold
+out I continued my search for something that would pay at least five
+dollars a week to begin with.</p>
+
+<p>On Monday night I was no nearer to being a bread-winner than when I had
+started out for the first time from Miss Jamison's boarding-house. I
+climbed the bare stairs at nightfall, and as I fumbled at the keyhole I
+could hear the click of a typewriter in the room next to mine. My room
+was quite dark, but there was a patch of dim white on the floor that
+sent a thrill of gladness all over me. I lighted the lamp and tore open
+the precious envelop before taking off my gloves or hat. It was a note
+from Minnie Plympton, saying she had got employment as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>demonstrator for
+a cereal-food company, and was making a tour of the small New England
+cities. The letter was dated at Bangor, Maine, and she asked me to write
+her at Portland, where she expected to be all week; and which I did, at
+considerable length, after I had cooked and eaten my supper.</p>
+
+<p>Bread and butter and black coffee for breakfast, and potato-soup and
+bread and butter for supper, with plain bread and butter done up in a
+piece of paper and carried with me for luncheon&mdash;this was my daily menu
+for the weeks that followed, varied on two occasions by the purchase of
+a half-pint of New Orleans molasses.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The advertisements for cigar and cigarette workers were very numerous;
+and as that sounded like humble work, I thought I might stand a better
+chance in that line than any other. Accordingly I applied to the foreman
+of a factory in Avenue A, who wanted "bunch-makers." He heard my
+petition in a drafty hallway through which a small army of boys and
+girls were pouring, each one stopping to insert a key in a
+time-register. They were just coming to work, for I was very early. The
+foreman, a young German, cut me off unceremoniously by asking to see my
+working-card; and when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> I looked at him blankly, for I hadn't a ghost of
+an idea what he meant, he strode away in disgust, leaving me to
+conjecture as to his meaning.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing daunted, however, for I meant to be very energetic and brave
+that morning, I went to the next factory. Here they wanted "labelers,"
+and as this sounded easy, I approached the foreman with something like
+confidence. He asked what experience I'd had, and I gave him a truthful reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry, but we're not running any kindergarten here," he replied curtly and turned away.</p>
+
+<p>I was still determined that I'd join the rank of cigar-makers. Somehow,
+they impressed me as a very prosperous lot of people, and there was
+something pungent and wholesome in the smell of the big, bright workrooms.</p>
+
+<p>The third foreman I besought was an elderly German with a paternal
+manner. He listened to me kindly, said I looked quick, and offered to
+put me on as an apprentice, explaining with much pomposity that
+cigar-making was a very difficult trade, at which I must serve a three
+years' apprenticeship before I could become a member of the union and
+entitled to draw union wages. I left him feeling very humble, and
+likewise disillusioned of my cigar-making ambitions.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p><p>"Girls wanted to learn binding and folding&mdash;paid while learning." The
+address took me to Brooklyn Bridge and down a strange, dark thoroughfare
+running toward the East River. Above was the great bridge, unreal,
+fairy-like in the morning mist. I was looking for Rose Street, which
+proved to be a zigzag alley that wriggled through one of the great
+bridge arches into a world of book-binderies. Rose Street was choked
+with moving carts loaded with yellow-back literature done up in bales.
+The superintendent proved to be a civil young man. He did not need me
+before Monday, but he told me to come back that day at half-past seven
+and to bring a bone paper-cutter with me. He paid only three dollars a
+week, and I accepted, but with the hope that as this was only Thursday,
+and not yet nine o'clock, I might find something better in the meantime.</p>
+
+<p>A Brooklyn merchant was in need of two "salesladies&mdash;experience not
+necessary." A trolley-car swirled me across the river, now glistering in
+the spring sunshine. We were hurtled down interminable vistas of small
+shops, always under the grim iron trestle of the elevated railroad. At
+the end of an hour I entered the "Majestic," a small store stocked with
+trash. After much dickering, Mr. Lindbloom and his wife decided I'd do
+at three and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> a half dollars per week, working from seven in the morning
+till nine in the evening, Saturdays till midnight. I departed with the
+vow that if I must work and starve, I should not do both in Lindbloom's.</p>
+
+<p>Five cents got me back to Cortlandt Street in Manhattan, where I called
+upon a candy-manufacturer who wanted bonbon-makers. The French foreman,
+in snowy cap and apron, received me in a great room dazzling with
+white-tile walls and floor, and filled with bright-eyed girls, also in
+caps and aprons, and working before marble tables. The Frenchman was
+polite and apologetic, but they never hired any but experienced workers.</p>
+
+<p>It was half-past three, and I had two more names on my list. Rose-making
+sounded attractive, and I walked all the way up to Bond Street. Shabby
+and prosaic, this street, strangely enough, has been selected as the
+forcing-ground or nursery of artificial flowers. Its signs on both
+sides, even unto the top floor, proclaim some specialization of
+fashionable millinery&mdash;flowers, feathers, aigrets, wire hat-frames. On
+the third floor, rear, of a once fashionable mansion, now fallen into
+decay, I stumbled into a room, radiantly scarlet with roses. The
+jangling bell attached to the door aroused no curiosity whatever in the
+white-faced girls bending over these gay<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> garlands. It was a signal,
+though, for a thick-set beetle-browed young fellow to bounce in from the
+next room and curtly demand my business.</p>
+
+<p>"We only pay a dollar and a half to learners," he said, smiling
+unpleasantly over large yellow teeth. I fled in dismay. Down Broadway,
+along Bleecker, and up squalid Thompson Street I hurried to a paper-box factory.</p>
+
+<p>The office of E. Springer &amp; Company was in pleasant contrast to the
+flower sweat-shop, for all its bright colors. So, too, was there a
+grateful comparison between the Jew of the ugly smile and the portly
+young man who sat behind a glass partition and acknowledged my entrance
+by glancing up from his ledger. The remark he made was evidently witty
+and not intended for my ears, for it made the assistant bookkeeper&mdash;a
+woman&mdash;and the two women typewriters laugh and crane their necks in my
+direction. The bookkeeper climbed down from his high stool and opened
+the glass door. He was as kind now as he was formerly merry. Possibly he
+had seen my chin quiver the least bit, and knew I was almost ready to
+cry. He did not ask many questions; but presently he sent one typewriter
+flying up-stairs for the superintendent, and the other was sent to ask
+of the forewoman if all the jobs were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> filled. The superintendent proved
+to be a woman, shrewd, keen-faced, and bespectacled. The forewoman sent
+down word that No. 105 had not rung up that morning, and that I could
+have her key. The pay was three dollars a week to learners, but Miss
+Price, the superintendent, thought I could learn in a week's time, which
+opinion the portly gentleman heartily indorsed, and so I allowed him to
+enroll my name. He gave me a key, showed me how to "ring up" in the
+register at the foot of the stairs, and told me that henceforth I should
+be known as "105."</p>
+
+<p>I thanked him in as steady a voice as I could command, and reached the
+street door on the stroke of six, just in time to hear my shopmates of
+the morrow laughing and scrambling down-stairs in their mad effort to
+get away from that which I had been trying to obtain for so many weeks.</p>
+
+<p>The street I stepped into had been transformed. Behind my blurred
+vision, as I hurried along, I saw no squalor, no wretchedness now.
+Through tears of thankfulness the houses, the streets, and the hurrying
+people were all glorified, all transfigured. Everything was right&mdash;the
+whole world and everybody in it.</p>
+
+<p>Thus I sped homeward on that eventful evening,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> eager to tell my good
+news to Mrs. Pringle, who, I knew, would be glad to hear it. As I drew
+near the block where I lived, I became half conscious of something
+strange and unusual in the atmosphere; I felt the strange sensation of
+being lost, of being in the wrong place. Men and women stood about in
+silent knots, and through the deep twilight I felt rather than heard the
+deep throbbing of fire-engines. Pressing through the little knots of men
+and women, I stood before the red mass of embers and watched the firemen
+pour their quenching streams upon the ashes of my lodging-house.</p>
+
+<p>Dazed, stupefied, I asked questions of the bystanders. But nobody knew
+anything definite. One man said he guessed a good many lives had been
+lost; the woman next to him said she'd heard the number was five.</p>
+
+<p>The houses on both sides were still standing, the windows smashed in,
+and the tenants fled. There seemed to be not even a neighbor who might
+know of the fate of my lodging-house acquaintance or of my good friend
+Mrs. Pringle. I spoke to a policeman. He listened gently, and then
+conducted me to a house in Fifteenth Street, where they had offered
+shelter for the night to any refugees who might desire it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p><p>The basement of this house had been turned into a dormitory, one
+section for the men and the other for the women, who were in greater
+number and came straggling in one by one. A man-servant in livery passed
+hot coffee and sandwiches, which we swallowed mechanically, regarding
+one another and our surroundings with stupid bewilderment. I had never
+met any of these people before, though they had all been my fellow-lodgers.</p>
+
+<p>The girl sitting on the cot next to mine passed her cup up for more
+coffee, and as she did so turned a quizzical gaze upon me. She was
+stupid and ugly. Her quizzical look deepened into curiosity, and by and by she asked:</p>
+
+<p>"Youse didn't live there too, did youse?"</p>
+
+<p>Our common misfortune inspired me to a cordial reply, and we fell into a
+discussion of the catastrophe. Her English was so sadly perverted and
+her voice so guttural that I could make out her meaning only with the
+greatest exercise of the imagination. But it was to the effect that the
+fire had started in a room on the top floor, whither poor old Mrs.
+Pringle had gone about three o'clock in the afternoon with a bucket of
+coal for the fire. Just what happened nobody knew. Every one on the top
+floor at the time had perished, including Mrs. Pringle.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p><p>"Didn't youse get nothin' out, neither?" asked my companion. And then
+it dawned upon me for the first time that I had nothing in all the world
+now but the clothes on my back and the promise of work on the morrow.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I have lost everything," I answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Youse got anything in the bank?" she pursued.</p>
+
+<p>The question seemed to me ironical and not worthy of notice.</p>
+
+<p>"I have. I've got 'most five hundred dollars saved up," she went on.</p>
+
+<p>"Five hundred dollars!"</p>
+
+<p>The girl nodded. "Huh, that's what! I could live tony if I wanted, but I
+like to save my money. I makes good money, too,&mdash;twelve dollars a
+week,&mdash;and I don't spend it, neither."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you do?" I asked, regarding the large, rough hands with
+something like admiration for their earning abilities.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm a lady-buffer," she answered, with a touch of pride.</p>
+
+<p>"A lady-buffer! What's that?" I cried, looking at the slovenly,
+dirt-streaked wrapper and the shabby golf-cape that had slipped from her
+shoulders to the cot. She regarded me with pity for my ignorance, and
+then delivered herself of an axiom.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p><p>"A lady-buffer is a lady what buffs." And, to render the definition
+still more explicit, she rolled up the sleeve of her wrapper, showed me
+mighty biceps, and then with her arm performed several rapid revolutions in midair.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you buff?" I next ventured.</p>
+
+<p>"Brass!"</p>
+
+<p>This laconic reply squelched me completely, and I subsided without
+further conversation.</p>
+
+<p>Despite my weariness, there was little sleep for me that night. Affairs
+had come to a crisis; my condition was about as bad as it could possibly
+be. Whatever was going to become of me? Why, in the name of all common
+sense, had I ever come to New York? Why was I not content to remain a
+country school-ma'am, in a place where a country school-ma'am was looked
+up to as something of a personage? That night, if I had had enough money
+to buy a ticket back to the town I had come from, my fate would have
+been settled definitely then and there.</p>
+
+<p>Not the least distressing part of my condition was the fact that there
+was really no help for me save what I should be able to give myself. To
+be sure, I had certain distant relatives and friends who had warned me
+against my flight to the city, and to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> whom I might have written begging
+for money sufficient to carry me back to my native place, and the money,
+with many "I-told-you-so's," would have been forthcoming. To return
+discredited was more than my pride could bear. I had to earn my
+livelihood anyway, and so, on this night of grim adversity, owing my
+very bed and supper to charity, I set my teeth, and closed my tired lids
+over the tears I could not hide, and swore I'd fight it out alone, so
+long as I had strength to stand and heart to hope; and then there was
+the prospect of a job at Springer's on the morrow, though the wage would
+hardly keep body and soul together.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The next morning, while her servants were giving us our breakfast, a
+stately middle-aged woman came down to the basement and passed among us,
+making inquiries regarding our various conditions, and offering words of
+well-meant, if patronizing, advice and suggestion wherever she thought
+them needed, but which somehow did not seem to be relished as her more
+material kindness had been. When it came my turn to be interviewed I
+answered her many questions frankly and promptly, and, encouraged by the
+evident interest which she displayed in my case, I was prompted to ask
+her if she might know of any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> place where I could get work. She looked
+at me a moment out of fine, clear eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"You would not go into service, I suppose?" she asked slowly.</p>
+
+<p>I had never thought of such an alternative before, but I met it without
+a moment's hesitation. "No, I would not care to go into service," I
+replied, and as I did so the lady's face showed mingled disappointment and disgust.</p>
+
+<p>"That is too bad," she answered, "for in that case I'm afraid I can do
+nothing for you." And with that she went out of the room, leaving me, I
+must confess, not sorry for having thus bluntly declared against wearing
+the definite badge of servitude.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>V</h2>
+
+<h3>IN WHICH I AM "LEARNED" BY PH&OElig;BE IN THE ART OF BOX-MAKING</h3>
+
+<p>The "lady-buffer" and I were the last to leave the house. We went out
+together and parted company at Third Avenue, she going south to her
+work, and I continuing along the street westward. The catastrophe of the
+preceding day seemed to have entirely evaporated from her memory; she
+seemed also to have forgotten the incident of our meeting and
+conversation of the night before, for she made no comment, nor even gave
+me a parting greeting.</p>
+
+<p>I was inclined to reproach such heartlessness as I hurried along, when
+suddenly it was borne in upon my consciousness that it was I, not she,
+who was open to that charge. Here I was, speeding along to my work with
+hope in my heart, sometimes almost forgetting that the woman who had
+been so kind to me was probably lying in the morgue, awaiting burial in
+the Potter's Field, unless saved from that ignoble<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> end by some friend.
+And yet I was powerless. I could not even spare time to go to the morgue
+or to make inquiries. I knew not a soul who could have helped me, and I
+had only one dollar and a half in all the world, no place to sleep that
+night, no change of garments, nothing except the promise of work that
+morning at Springer's. I stopped at the corner, strongly tempted by my
+innate sense of decency to the memory of the dead. But only for a
+moment: the law of life&mdash;self-preservation&mdash;again asserted itself, and
+for the time being I put the past behind me and hurried on toward Thompson Street.</p>
+
+<p>It lacked but a few minutes of eight o'clock when, at last, I turned
+into the squalid street at the end of which stands Springer's. In the
+sunshine of the mild March morning the fa&ccedil;ade of the tall buff building
+looked for all the world like a gaunt, ugly, unkempt hag, frowning
+between bleared old eyes that seemed to coax&mdash;nay, rather to coerce me
+into entering her awful house.</p>
+
+<p>The instant impression was one of repulsion, and the impulse was to run
+away. But there was fascination, too, in the hag-like visage of those
+grim brick walls, checkered with innumerable dirty windows and trussed
+up, like a paralytic old crone, with rusty fire-escapes. It was the
+fascination of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> the mysterious and of the evil; and, repulsive and
+forbidding as was its general aspect, nothing could now have induced me
+to turn back. Instinct told me that I was about to enter into no
+commonplace experience. And so, unresisting, I was borne along in the
+swift current of humanity that was swept down the street, like the water
+in a mill-race, to turn the wheels of workshop and factory. Before
+Springer's a great arm of this human mill-stream eddied inward, to be
+lost in another moment in the vortex of the wide black doors, whence
+issued muffled sounds of the pandemonium within. At the last moment I
+hesitated, obsessed once more with the indefinable horror of it all.
+Again there was the strong impulse to run away&mdash;far, far away from
+Springer's and from Thompson Street, when suddenly the old monody began
+to ring in my ears, "<span class="smaller">WORK OR STARVE, WORK OR STARVE</span>!" Another moment,
+and I too had passed within the wide black doors.</p>
+
+<p>The entrance passage was lighted by a sickly gas-jet, and in its flicker
+a horde of loud-mouthed girls were making frantic efforts to insert
+their keys in the time-register. I was jostled and tumbled over
+unceremoniously. I was pushed and punched unmercifully by the crowding
+elbows, until I found myself squeezed tight against the wall. From the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+scrambling and confusion it was evident everybody was late, and tones
+and language attested to racked nerves and querulous tempers. Suddenly
+there was a scuffle and the sharp scraping of feet on the floor.</p>
+
+<p>"Get out, yez dirty Irish!" rang out in the stifling air.</p>
+
+<p>"I wuz here fust!" snarled another voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Call me dirty Irish ag'in and I'll dirty Irish you."</p>
+
+<p>The black-haired girl had accepted the challenge, and the maligned
+daughter of Erin, cheeks aflame and eyes blazing, rushed at her
+detractor with clenched fist.</p>
+
+<p>"Go for her, Rosie! She's nothin' but a dirty black Ginney, nohow!"</p>
+
+<p>"Pitch into her, Celie! Punch her!" yelled a chorus from the stairs who
+came swooping down from above, attracted by the scrimmage, and just in
+time to see the combatants rush at each other in a hand-to-hand
+struggle, punctuated with loud oaths.</p>
+
+<p>The noise suddenly subsided at the screeching of a raucous nasal voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, young ladies! What does this mean?" demanded the superintendent,
+and Rosie and Celie both began to talk at once.</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind about the rest of it," snapped Miss<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> Price, cutting the tale
+short. "I'll dock you both half a day's pay: and the next time it
+happens you'll both be fired on the spot."</p>
+
+<p>Then Miss Price turned to me, while the now silent wranglers meekly
+turned their keys in the register and marched up-stairs, whither their
+respective factions had since disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>"I do hope to goodness you ain't high-tempered like some is," she
+remarked, with an effort toward affability, as we stepped before the
+time-register, where I inserted my key for the first time. "All I got to
+say is, don't get into no fights with the girls. When they say things to
+you, don't talk back. It's them that just takes things as they come, and
+lets bygones be bygones, that get the good checks at the end of the
+week. Some of them fight more 'n they work, but I guess you won't be
+that kind," she concluded, with an unctuous smile, displaying two rows
+of false teeth. Then, with a quick, nervous, jerky gait, she hopped up
+the flight of rough plank stairs, threw open a door, and ushered me into
+the bedlam noises of the "loft," where, amid the roar of machinery and
+the hum of innumerable voices, I was to meet my prospective forewoman.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Kinzer! Here's a lady wants to learn," shrilled the high nasal
+voice. "Miss Kinzer!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> Where's Miss Kinzer? Oh, here you are!" as a young
+woman emerged from behind a pile of pasteboard boxes. "I've a learner
+for you, Miss Kinzer. She's a green girl, but she looks likely, and I
+want you to give her a good chance. Better put her on table-work to
+begin with." And with that injunction the little old maid hopped away,
+leaving me to the scrutiny and cross-questioning of a rather pretty
+woman of twenty-eight or thirty.</p>
+
+<p>"Ever worked in a factory before?" she began, with lofty indifference,
+as if it didn't matter whether I had or had not.</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Where did you work?"</p>
+
+<p>"I never worked any place before."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh-h!" There was a world of meaning, as I afterward discovered, in Miss
+Kinzer's long-drawn-out "Oh-h!" In this instance she looked up quickly,
+with an obvious display of interest, as if she had just unearthed a
+remarkable specimen in one who had never worked at anything before.</p>
+
+<p>"You're not used to work, then?" she remarked insinuatingly,
+straightening up from the rude desk where she sat like the judge of a
+police-court. She was now all attention.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, not exactly that," I replied, nettled by her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> manner and, above
+all, by her way of putting things. "I have worked before, but never at factory-work."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why didn't you say so?"</p>
+
+<p>She now opened her book and inscribed my name therein.</p>
+
+<p>"Where do you live?"</p>
+
+<p>"Over in East Fourteenth Street," I replied mechanically, forgetting for
+the moment the catastrophe that had rendered me more homeless than ever.</p>
+
+<p>"Home?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I room." Then, reading only too quickly an unpleasant
+interpretation in the uplifted eyebrows, a disagreeable curiosity
+mirrored in the brown eyes beneath, I added hastily, "I have no home. My
+folks are all dead."</p>
+
+<p>What impression this bit of information made I was unable to determine
+as I followed her slender, slightly bowed figure across the busy, roaring workroom.</p>
+
+<p>"Be careful you don't get hurt," she cried, as we threaded a narrow
+passage in and out among the stamping, throbbing machinery, where, by
+the light that filtered through the grimy windows, I got vague, confused
+glimpses of girl-faces shining like stars out of this dark, fearful
+chaos of revolving<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> belts and wheels, and above the bedlam noises came
+girlish laughter and song.</p>
+
+<p>"Good morning, Carrie!" one quick-witted toiler sang out as she spied
+the new girl in tow of the forewoman, and suddenly the whole room had
+taken up the burden of the song.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't mind them," my conductor remarked. "They don't mean nothing by
+it&mdash;watch out there for your head!"</p>
+
+<p>Safe through the outlying ramparts of machinery, we entered the domain
+of the table-workers, and I was turned over to Ph&oelig;be, a tall girl in
+tortoise ear-rings and curl-papers. Ph&oelig;be was assigned to "learn" me
+in the trade of "finishing." Somewhat to my surprise, she assumed the
+task joyfully, and helped me off with my coat and hat. From the
+loud-mouthed tirades as to "Annie Kinzer's nerve," it became evident
+that the assignment of the job of "learner" is one to cause heartburning
+jealousies, and that Ph&oelig;be, either because of some special
+adaptability or through favoritism, got the lion's share of novices.</p>
+
+<p>"That's right, Ph&oelig;be; hog every new girl that comes along!" amiably
+bawled a bright-faced, tidy young woman who answered to the name of Mrs.
+Smith. Mrs. Smith worked briskly as she talked,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> and the burden of her
+conversation appeared to be the heaping of this sort of good-natured
+invective upon the head of her chum&mdash;or, as she termed it, her
+"lady-friend," Ph&oelig;be. The amiability with which Mrs. Smith dealt out
+her epithets was only equaled by the perfect good nature of her victim,
+who replied to each and all of them with a musically intoned, "Hot air!"</p>
+
+<p>"Hot A&mdash;i&mdash;r!" The clear tones of Ph&oelig;be's soprano set the echoes
+ringing all over the great workroom. In and out among the aisles and
+labyrinthine passages that wind through towering piles of boxes, from
+the thundering machinery far over on the other side of the "loft" to the
+dusky recess of the uttermost table, the musical cry reverberated.</p>
+
+<p>"Hot a&mdash;i&mdash;r!" Every few minutes, all through the long, weary day,
+Ph&oelig;be found occasion for sounding that magic call.</p>
+
+<p>"The rest of the ladies get up their backs something awful," Ph&oelig;be
+explained as she dragged a big green pasteboard box from beneath the
+work-table. "They say she gives me more 'n my share of learners because
+I'm easy to get on with, I guess, and don't play no tricks on them....
+You have a right to put your things in here along with my lunch. Them
+girls is like to do 'most anything to a new girl's duds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> if you wuz to
+hang them in the coat-room. Them Ginneys 'll do 'most anything. Wuz you
+down-stairs when Celie Polatta got into the fight with Rosie?"</p>
+
+<p>"I just missed it," she sighed in reply to my affirmative. "I was born unlucky."</p>
+
+<p>"Hello, Ph&oelig;be! So you've hogged another!" a new voice called across
+the table, and I put a question.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do they all want to teach the new girl? I should think they'd be
+glad to be rid of the trouble."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean <i>learn</i> her? Why, because the girl that learns the green hand
+gets all her work checked on to her own card while she's learning how.
+Never worked in a box-factory before?" I shook my head.</p>
+
+<p>"I guessed as much. Well, box-making's a good trade. Have you an apron?"</p>
+
+<p>As I had not, I was then ordered to "turn my skirt," in order that I
+might receive the inevitable coat of glue and paste on its inner rather
+than on its outer surface. I gently demurred against this very slovenly expedient.</p>
+
+<p>"All right; call it hot air if you want to. I s'pose you know it all,"
+tossing her curl-papers with scorn. "You know better 'n me, of course.
+Most learners do think they knows it all. Now looky here, I've been here
+six years, and I've learned lots of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> green girls, and I never had one as
+didn't think she hadn't ought to turn her skirt. The ladies I'm used to
+working with likes to walk home looking decent and respectable, no
+difference what they're like other times."</p>
+
+<p>With the respectability of my ladyhood thus impeached, and lest I
+infringe upon the cast-iron code of box-factory etiquette, there was
+nothing to do but yield. I unhooked my skirt, dropped it to the floor,
+and stepped out of it in a trice, anxious to do anything to win back the
+good will of Ph&oelig;be. Instantly she brightened, and good humor once
+more flashed over her grimy features.</p>
+
+<p>"H-m! that's the stuff! There's one thing you hadn't ought to forget,
+and mind, I'm speaking as one lady-friend to another when I tell you
+these things&mdash;and that is, that you have a right to do as the other
+girls in the factory or you'll never get 'long with them. If you don't
+they'll get down on you, sure's pussy's a cat; and then they'll make it
+hot for you with complaining to the forelady. And then she'll get down
+on you after while too, and won't give you no good orders to work on;
+and&mdash;well, it's just this way: a girl mustn't be odd."</p>
+
+<p>Continuing her philosophy of success, Ph&oelig;be proceeded to initiate me
+into the first process of my job,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> which consisted in pasting slippery,
+sticky strips of muslin over the corners of the rough brown boxes that
+were piled high about us in frail, tottering towers reaching to the
+ceiling, which was trellised over with a network of electric wires and
+steam-pipes. Two hundred and fifty of these boxes remained to be
+finished on the particular order upon which Ph&oelig;be was working. Each
+must be given eight muslin strips, four on the box and four on its
+cover; two tapes, inserted with a hair-pin through awl-holes; two tissue
+"flies," to tuck over the bonnet soon to nestle underneath; four pieces
+of gay paper lace to please madame's eye when the lid is lifted; and
+three labels, one on the bottom, one on the top, and one bearing the
+name of a Fifth Avenue modiste on an escutcheon of gold and purple.</p>
+
+<p>The job, as it progressed, entailed ceaseless shoving and shifting and
+lifting. In order that we might not be walled in completely by our
+cumbersome materials, every few minutes we bore tottering piles across
+the floor to the "strippers."</p>
+
+<p>These latter, who were small girls, covered the sides with glazed paper
+on machines; and as fast as each box was thus covered it was tossed to
+the "turner-in," a still smaller girl, who turned in the overlapping
+edge of the strip, after which the box was ready<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> to come back to the
+table for the next process at our hands.</p>
+
+<p>By ten o'clock, with Mrs. Smith's gay violet-boxes and our own
+bonnet-boxes, we had built a snug bower all round our particular table.
+Through its pasteboard walls the din and the songs came but faintly. My
+mates' tongues flew as fast as their fingers. The talk was chiefly
+devoted to clothes, Ph&oelig;be's social activities, and the evident
+prosperity of Mrs. Smith's husband's folks, among whom it appeared she
+had only recently appeared as "Jeff's" bride. Having exhausted the
+Smiths, she again gave Ph&oelig;be the floor by asking:</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I should say! Don't I look it?"</p>
+
+<p>To determine by Ph&oelig;be's appearance where she might be going were an
+impossibility to the uninitiated, for her dress was an odd combination
+of the extremes of wretchedness and luxury. A woefully torn and
+much-soiled shirt-waist; a gorgeous gold watch worn on her breast like a
+medal; a black taffeta skirt, which, under the glue-smeared apron,
+emitted an unmistakable frou-frou; three Nethersole bracelets on her
+wrist; and her feet incased in colossal shoes, broken and stringless.
+The latter she explained to Mrs. Smith.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p><p>"I just swiped a pair of paw's and brought them along this morning, or
+I'd be dished for getting into them high heels to-night. My corns and
+bunions 'most killed me yesterday&mdash;they always do break out bad about
+Easter. My pleasure club," she explained, turning to me&mdash;"my pleasure
+club, 'The Moonlight Maids,' give a ball to-night." Which fact likewise
+explained the curl-papers as well as the slattern shirt-waist, donned to
+save the evening bodice worn to the factory that morning and now tucked
+away in a big box under the table.</p>
+
+<p>A whole side of our pretty violet-sprinkled bower caved in as a little
+"turner-in" lurched against it in passing with a top-heavy column of
+boxes. Through the opening daylight is visible once more, and from the
+region of the machines is heard a chorus of voices singing "The Fatal Wedding."</p>
+
+<p>"Hot a&mdash;i&mdash;r!" Ph&oelig;be intones derisively. "It's a wonder Angelina
+wouldn't get a new song. Them strippers sing that 'Fatal Wedding' week
+in and week out."</p>
+
+<p>We worked steadily, and as the hours dragged on I began to grow dead
+tired. The awful noise and confusion, the terrific heat, the foul smell
+of the glue, and the agony of breaking ankles and blistered hands seemed
+almost unendurable.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span></p><p>At last the hour-hand stood at twelve, and suddenly, out of the
+turmoil, a strange quiet fell over the great mill. The vibrations that
+had shaken the whole structure to its very foundations now gradually
+subsided; the wheels stayed their endless revolutions; the flying belts
+now hung from the ceiling like long black ribbons. Out of the stillness
+girl-voices and girl-laughter echoed weirdly, like a horn blown in a
+dream, while sweeter and clearer than ever rang Ph&oelig;be's soprano "Hot air!"</p>
+
+<p>The girls lunched in groups of ten and twelve. Each clique had its
+leader. By an unwritten law I was included among those who rallied
+around Ph&oelig;be, most of whom she had "learned" at some time or other,
+as she was now "learning" me. The luncheons were divested of their
+newspaper wrappings and spread over the ends of tables, on discarded
+box-lids held across the knees&mdash;in fact, any place convenience or
+sociability dictated. Then followed a friendly exchange of pickles and
+cake. A dark, swarthy girl, whom they called "Goldy" Courtleigh, was
+generous in the distribution of the lukewarm contents of a broken-nosed
+tea-pot, which was constantly replenished by application to the hot-water faucet.</p>
+
+<p>Although we had a half-hour, luncheon was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>swallowed quickly by most of
+the girls, eager to steal away to a sequestered bower among the boxes,
+there to lose themselves in paper-backed romance. A few of less literary
+taste were content to nibble ice-cream sandwiches and gossip. Dress, the
+inevitable masquerade ball, murders and fires, were favorite topics of
+discussion,&mdash;the last always with lowered voices and deep-drawn
+breathing. For fire is the box-maker's terror, the grim specter that
+always haunts her, and with good reason does she always start at the word.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm always afraid," declared Ph&oelig;be, "and I always run to the window
+and get ready to jump the minute I hear the alarm."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't," mused Angelina; "I haven't sense enough to jump: I faint dead
+away. There'd be no chance for me if a fire ever broke out here."</p>
+
+<p>Once or twice there was mention of beaux and "steady fellows," but the
+flesh-and-blood man of every-day life did not receive as much attention
+in this lunch chat as did the heroes of the story-books.</p>
+
+<p>While it was evident, of course, from scattered comments that box-makers
+are constantly marrying, it was likewise apparent that they have not
+sufficient imagination to invest their hard-working, sweat-grimed
+sweethearts with any halo of romance.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p><p>Promptly at half-past twelve the awakening machinery called us back to
+the workaday world. Story-books were tucked away, and their entranced
+readers dragged themselves back to the machines and steaming paste-pots,
+to dream and to talk as they worked, hot of their own fellows of last
+night's masquerade, but of bankers and mill-owners who in fiction have
+wooed and won and honorably wedded just such poor toilers as they themselves.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>IN WHICH PH&OElig;BE AND MRS. SMITH HOLD FORTH UPON MUSIC AND LITERATURE</h3>
+
+<p>"Don't you never read no story-books?" Mrs. Smith asked, stirring the
+paste-pot preparatory to the afternoon's work. She looked at me
+curiously out of her shrewd, snapping dark eyes as she awaited my
+answer. I was conscious that Mrs. Smith didn't like me for some reason
+or other, and I was anxious to propitiate her. I was pretty certain she
+thought me a boresome prig, and I determined I'd prove I wasn't. My
+confession of an omnivorous appetite for all sorts of story-books had
+the desired effect; and when I confessed further, that I liked best of
+all a real, tender, sentimental love-story, she asked amiably:</p>
+
+<p>"How do you like 'Little Rosebud's Lovers'?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've never read that," I replied. "Is it good?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's fine," interposed Ph&oelig;be; "but I like 'Woven on Fate's Loom'
+better&mdash;don't you?" The last addressed to Mrs. Smith.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></p><p>"No, I can't say as that's my impinion," returned our vis-&agrave;-vis, with a
+judicious tipping of the head to one side as she soused her dripping
+paste-brush over the strips. "Not but what 'Woven on Fate's Loom' is a
+good story in its way, either, for them that likes that sort of story.
+But I think 'Little Rosebud's Lovers' is more int'resting, besides being better wrote."</p>
+
+<p>"And that's just what I don't like about it," retorted Ph&oelig;be, her
+fingers traveling like lightning up and down the corners of the boxes.
+"You like this hot-air talk, and I don't; and the way them fellows and
+girls shoot hot-air at each other in that there 'Little Rosebud's
+Lovers' is enough to beat the street-cars!"</p>
+
+<p>"What is it about?" I asked with respectful interest, addressing the
+question to Mrs. Smith, who gave promise of being a more serious
+reviewer than the flippant Ph&oelig;be. Mrs. Smith took a bite of gingerbread and began:</p>
+
+<p>"It's about a fair, beautiful young girl by the name of Rosebud Arden.
+Her pa was a judge, and they lived in a grand mansion in South Car'lina.
+Little Rosebud&mdash;that's what everybody called her&mdash;had a stepsister Maud.
+They was both beauties, only Maud didn't have a lovely disposition like
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>Little Rosebud. A Harvard gradjate by the name of Percy Fielding got
+stuck on Little Rosebud for the wealth she was to get from her pa, and
+she was terrible stuck on him. She was stuck on him for fair, though not
+knowing he was a villain of the deepest dye. That's what the book called
+him. He talked her into marrying him clandestinely. Maud and her mother
+put up a job to get rid of Little Rosebud, so Maud could get all the
+money. So they told lies to her pa, who loved her something awful; and
+one night, when she came in after walking in the grand garden with her
+husband, who nobody knew she was married to, she found herself locked
+out. Then she went to the hotel where he was staying, and told him what
+had happened; but he turned her down flat when he heard it, for he
+didn't want nothing to do with her when she wasn't to get her pa's money; and then&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She stopped her cornering to inspect my work, which had not flagged an
+instant. Mrs. Smith took another bite of gingerbread, and continued with
+increasing animation:</p>
+
+<p>"And then Little Rosebud turned away into the night with a low cry, just
+as if a dagger had been punched into her heart and turned around slow.
+She was only sixteen years old, and she had been brought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> up in luxury
+and idolized by her father; and all of a sudden she found herself
+homeless, with nowheres to sleep find no money to get a room at the
+hotel, and scorned by the man that had sworn to protect her. Her pa had
+cursed her, too, something awful, so that he burst a blood-vessel a
+little while afterwards and died before morning. Only Little Rosebud
+never found this out, for she took the midnight express and came up here
+to New York, where her aunt lived, only she didn't know the street-number."</p>
+
+<p>"Where did she get the money to come to New York with?" interrupted the
+practical Ph&oelig;be. "That's something I don't understand. If she didn't
+have no money to hire a room at a hotel down in South Carolina for
+overnight, I'd like to know where she got money for a railroad ticket."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's just all you know about them swells," retorted Mrs. Smith.
+"I suppose a rich man's daughter like that can travel around all over
+the country on a pass. And saying she didn't have a pass, it's only a
+story and not true anyway.</p>
+
+<p>"She met a fellow on the train that night who was a villain for fair!"
+she went on. "His name was Mr. Paul Howard, and he was a corker. Little
+Rosebud, who was just as innocent as they make 'em, fell right into his
+clutches. He was a terrible man; he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> wouldn't stop at nothing, but he
+was a very elegant-looking gentleman that you'd take anywheres for a
+banker or 'Piscopalian preacher. He tipped his hat to Little Rosebud,
+and then she up and asked if he knew where her aunt, Mrs. Waldron,
+lived. This was nuts for him, and he said yes, that Mrs. Waldron was a
+particular lady-friend of his. When they got to New York he offered to
+take Little Rosebud to her aunt's house. And as Little Rosebud hadn't no
+money, she said yes, and the villain called a cab and they started for
+Brooklyn, him laughing to himself all the time, thinking how easily she
+was going to tumble into the trap he was getting fixed for her."</p>
+
+<p>"Hot air!" murmured Ph&oelig;be.</p>
+
+<p>"But while they were rattling over the Brooklyn Bridge, another man was
+following them in another cab&mdash;a Wall-street broker with barrels of
+cash. He was Raymond Leslie, and a real good man. He'd seen Rosebud get
+into the cab with Paul Howard, who he knew for a villain for fair. They
+had a terrible rumpus, but Raymond Leslie rescued her and took her to
+her aunt's house. It turned out that he was the gentleman-friend of
+Little Rosebud's cousin Ida, the very place they were going to. But,
+riding along in the cab, he fell in love with Little Rosebud,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> and then
+he was in a terrible pickle because he was promised to Ida. Little
+Rosebud's relations lived real grand, and her aunt was real nice to her
+until she saw she had hooked on to Ida's gentleman-friend; then they put
+her to work in the kitchen and treated her terrible. Oh, I tell you she
+had a time of it, for fair. Her aunt was awful proud and wicked, and
+after while, when she found that Raymond Leslie was going to marry
+Little Rosebud even if they did make a servant of her, she hired Paul
+Howard to drug her and carry her off to an insane-asylum that he ran up
+in Westchester County. It was in a lonesome place, and was full of girls
+that he had loved only to grow tired of and cast off, and this was the
+easiest way to get rid of them and keep them from spoiling his sport.
+Once a girl was in love with Paul Howard, she loved him till death. He
+just fascinated women like a snake does a bird, and he was hot stuff as
+long as he lasted, but the minute he got tired of you he was a demon of cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>"He did everything he could, when he got Little Rosebud here, to get her
+under his power. He tried his dirty best to poison her food, but Little
+Rosebud was foxy and wouldn't touch a bite of anything, but just sat in
+her cell and watched the broiled chicken and fried oysters, and all the
+other good things they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> sent to tempt her, turn to a dark-purplish hue.
+One night she escaped disguised in the turnkey's daughter's dress. Her
+name was Dora Gray, and Paul Howard had blasted her life too, but she
+worshiped him something awful, all the same-ee. Dora Gray gave Little
+Rosebud a lovely dark-red rose that was soaked with deadly poison, so
+that if you touched it to the lips of a person, the person would drop
+dead. She told Little Rosebud to protect herself with it if they chased
+her. But she didn't get a chance to see whether it would work or not,
+for when she heard them coming back of her after while with the
+bloodhounds barking, she dropped with terror down flat on her stummick.
+She had suffered so much she couldn't stand anything more. The doctors
+said she was dead when they picked her up, and they buried her and stuck
+a little white slab on her grave, with 'Rosebud, aged sixteen' on it."</p>
+
+<p>"Hot air!" from the irrepressible Ph&oelig;be.</p>
+
+<p>I felt that courtesy required I should agree upon that point, and I did
+so, conservatively, venturing to ask the name of the author.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Smith mentioned the name of a well-known writer of trashy fiction
+and added, "Didn't you never read none of her books?"</p>
+
+<p>My negative surprised her. Then Ph&oelig;be asked:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p><p>"Did you ever read 'Daphne Vernon; or, A Coronet of Shame'?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I haven't read them, either," I replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, mama! Carry me out and let me die!" groaned Mrs. Smith, throwing
+down her paste-brush and falling forward in mock agony upon the smeared table.</p>
+
+<p>"Water! Water!" gasped Ph&oelig;be, clutching wildly at her throat; "I'm
+going to faint!"</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter? What did I say that wasn't right?" I cried, the
+nature of their antics showing only too plainly that I had "put my foot
+in it" in some unaccountable manner. But they paid no attention.
+Mortified and utterly at sea, I watched their convulsed shoulders and
+heard their smothered giggles. Then in a few minutes they straightened
+up and resumed work with the utmost gravity of countenance and without a
+word of explanation.</p>
+
+<p>"What was it you was asking?" Ph&oelig;be inquired presently, with the most
+innocent air possible.</p>
+
+<p>"I said I hadn't read the books you mentioned," I replied, trying to
+hide the chagrin and mortification I felt at being so ignominiously laughed at.</p>
+
+<p>"Eyether of them?" chirped Mrs. Smith, with a vicious wink.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p><p>"Eyether of them?" warbled Ph&oelig;be in her mocking-bird soprano.</p>
+
+<p>It was my turn to drop the paste-brush now. Eye-ther! It must have
+slipped from my tongue unconsciously. I could not remember having ever
+pronounced the word like that before.</p>
+
+<p>I didn't feel equal, then and there, to offering them any explanation or
+apologies for the offense. So I simply answered:</p>
+
+<p>"No; are they very good? are they as good as 'Little Rosebud's Lovers'?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, it ain't," said Mrs. Smith, decisively and a little contemptuously;
+"and it ain't two books, eye-ther; it's all in one&mdash;'Daphne Vernon; or,
+A Coronet of Shame.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now I think it is," put in Ph&oelig;be. "Them stories with
+two-handled names is nearly always good. I'll buy a book with a
+two-handled name every time before I'll buy one that ain't. I was
+reading a good one last night that I borrowed from Gladys Carringford.
+It had three handles to its name, and they was all corkers."</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you spit 'em out?" suggested Mrs. Smith. "Tell us what it was."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it was 'Doris; or, The Pride of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>Pemberton Mills; or, Lost in a
+Fearful Fate's Abyss.' What d' ye think of that?"</p>
+
+<p>"It sounds very int'resting. Who wrote it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Charles Garvice," replied Ph&oelig;be. "Didn't you ever read none of his,
+e&mdash;y&mdash;e&mdash;ther?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I must say I never did," I answered, ignoring their mischievous
+raillery with as much grace as I could summon, but taking care to choose
+my words so as to avoid further pitfalls.</p>
+
+<p>"And did you never read none of Charlotte M. Braeme's?" drawled Mrs.
+Smith, with remorseless cruelty&mdash;"none of Charlotte M. Braeme's, eye-ther?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Nor none by Effie Adelaide Rowlands, e&mdash;y&mdash;e-ther?" still persisted Mrs. Smith.</p>
+
+<p>"No; none by her."</p>
+
+<p>"E&mdash;y&mdash;e&mdash;ther!" Both my tormentors now raised their singing-voices into
+a high, clear, full-blown note of derisive music, held it for a brief
+moment at a dizzy altitude, and then in soft, long-drawn-out cadences
+returned to earth and speaking-voices again.</p>
+
+<p>"What kind of story-books do you read, then?" they demanded. To which I
+replied with the names of a dozen or more of the simple, every-day
+classics<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> that the school-boy and-girl are supposed to have read. They
+had never heard of "David Copperfield" or of Dickens. Nor had they ever
+heard of "Gulliver's Travels," nor of "The Vicar of Wakefield." They had
+heard the name "Robinson Crusoe," but they did not know it was the name
+of an entrancing romance. "Little Women," "John Halifax, Gentleman,"
+"The Cloister and the Hearth," "Les Mis&eacute;rables," were also unknown,
+unheard-of literary treasures. They were equally ignorant of the
+existence of the conventional Sunday-school romance. They stared at me
+in amazement when I rattled off a heterogeneous assortment from the
+fecund pens of Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, "Pansy," Amanda M. Douglas, and
+similar good-goody writers for good-goody girls; their only remarks
+being that their titles didn't sound interesting. I spoke
+enthusiastically of "Little Women," telling them how I had read it four
+times, and that I meant to read it again some day. Their curiosity was
+aroused over the unheard-of thing of anybody ever wanting to read any
+book more than once, and they pressed me to reciprocate by repeating the
+story for them, which I did with great accuracy of statement, and with
+genuine pleasure to myself at being given an opportunity to introduce
+anybody to Meg and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> Jo and all the rest of that delightful March family.
+When I had finished, Ph&oelig;be stopped her cornering and Mrs. Smith
+looked up from her label-pasting.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, that's no story at all," the latter declared.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, no," echoed Ph&oelig;be; "that's no story&mdash;that's just everyday
+happenings. I don't see what's the use putting things like that in
+books. I'll bet any money that lady what wrote it knew all them boys and
+girls. They just sound like real, live people; and when you was telling
+about them I could just see them as plain as plain could be&mdash;couldn't you, Gwendolyn?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yep," yawned our vis-&agrave;-vis, undisguisedly bored.</p>
+
+<p>"But I suppose farmer folks likes them kind of stories," Ph&oelig;be
+generously suggested. "They ain't used to the same styles of anything
+that us city folks are."</p>
+
+<p>While we had been trying to forget our tired limbs in a discussion of
+literary tastes and standards, our workmates had been relieving the
+treadmill tedium of the long afternoon by various expedients. The
+quartet at the table immediately in front of us had been making inane
+doggerel rhymes upon the names of their workmates, telling riddles, and
+exchanging nasty stories with great gusto and frequent fits of wild
+laughter. At another table the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> forthcoming ball of the "Moonlight
+Maids" was under hot discussion, and at a very long table in front of
+the elevator they were talking in subdued voices about dreams and omens,
+making frequent reference to a greasy volume styled "The Lucky Dream Book."</p>
+
+<p>Far over, under the windows, the stripper girls were tuning up their
+voices preparatory to the late-afternoon concert, soon to begin. They
+hummed a few bars of one melody, then of another; and at last, Angela's
+voice leading, there burst upon the room in full chorus, to the rhythmic
+whir of the wheels, the melodious music and maudlin stanzas of "The Fatal Wedding."</p>
+
+<p>Ph&oelig;be lent her flute-like soprano to the next song, the rather pretty
+melody of which was not sufficient to redeem the banality of the words:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"The scene is a banquet where beauty and wealth</div>
+<div class="i1">Have gathered in splendid array;</div>
+<div>But silent and sad is a fair woman there,</div>
+<div class="i1">Whose young heart is pining away.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>"A card is brought to her&mdash;she reads there a name</div>
+<div class="i1">Of one that she loved long ago;</div>
+<div>Then sadly she whispers, 'Just say I'm not here,</div>
+<div class="i1">For my story he never must know.'</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span><div>"That night in the banquet at Misery Hall</div>
+<div class="i1">She reigned like a queen on a throne;</div>
+<div>But often the tears filled her beautiful eyes</div>
+<div class="i1">As she dreamed of the love she had known.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Her thoughts flowed along through the laughter and song</div>
+<div class="i1">To the days she could never recall,</div>
+<div>And she longed to find rest on her dear mother's breast</div>
+<div class="i1">At the banquet in Misery Hall.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>"The time passes quickly, and few in the throng</div>
+<div class="i1">Have noticed the one vacant chair&mdash;</div>
+<div>Till out of the beautiful garden beyond</div>
+<div class="i1">A pistol-shot rings on the air.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Now see, in the moonlight a handsome youth lays&mdash;</div>
+<div class="i1">Too quickly his life doth depart;</div>
+<div>While kneeling beside him, the woman he'd loved</div>
+<div class="i1">Finds her picture is close to his heart."</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"What is the name of that song?" I asked when the last cadence of
+Ph&oelig;be's voice, which was sustained long after every other in the room
+was hushed, had died away.</p>
+
+<p>"That! Why, it's 'The Banquet in Misery Hall,'" answered Mrs. Smith,
+somewhat impatient of my unfolding ignorance. But I speedily forgot the
+rebuke in a lively interest in the songs that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>followed one another
+without interlude. Ph&oelig;be was counting her pile of boxes and ranging
+them into piles of twelve high; so she couldn't sing, and I,
+consequently, could not catch all the words of each song. The theme in
+every case was a more or less ungrammatical, crude, and utterly banal
+rendition of the claptrap morality exploited in the cheap story-books.
+Reduced to the last analysis, they had to do with but one subject&mdash;the
+frailty of woman. On the one side was presented Virtue tempted,
+betrayed, repentant; on the other side, Virtue fighting at bay,
+persecuted, scourged, but emerging in the end unspotted and victorious,
+with all good things added unto it.</p>
+
+<p>It was to me an entirely new way of looking at life; and though I
+couldn't in the least explain it to myself, it seemed, to my
+unsophisticated way of looking at such matters, that the propensity to
+break the seventh commandment was much exaggerated, and that songs about
+other subjects would have been much more interesting and not nearly so
+trying to the feelings. For the sweet voices of the singers could not
+but make the tears come to my eyes, in spite of the fact that the burden
+of the song seemed so unworthy.</p>
+
+<p>"You all sing so beautifully!" I cried, in honest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> admiration, at the
+close of one particularly melodious and extremely silly ditty. "Where
+did you learn?"</p>
+
+<p>Ph&oelig;be was pleased at the compliment implied by the tears in my eyes,
+and even Mrs. Smith forgot to throw out her taunting "eye-ther" as she
+stood still and regarded my very frank and unconcealed emotion.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess we sort of learn from the Ginney girls," explained Ph&oelig;be.
+"Them Ginneys is all nice singers, and everybody in the shop kind of
+gets into the way of singing good, too, from being with them. You ought
+to hear them sing Dago songs, oughtn't she, Gwendolyn?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yep," answered Gwendolyn; "I could just die hearing Angela and Celie
+Polatta singing that&mdash;what-d'ye-call-it, that always makes a body bu'st
+out crying?"</p>
+
+<p>"You mean 'Punchinello.' Yep, that's a corker; but, Lord! the one what
+makes me have all kinds of funny cold feelings run up my back is that
+'Ave Maria.' Therese Nicora taught them&mdash;what she says she learned in
+the old country. I wouldn't want anything to eat if I could hear songs
+like that all the time."</p>
+
+<p>The clock-hands over Annie Kinzer's desk had now crept close to the hour
+of six, and Angela had only begun the first stanza of&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span><div>"Papa, tell me where is mama," cried a little girl one day;</div>
+<div>"I'm so lonesome here without her, tell me why she went away.</div>
+<div>You don't know how much I'm longing for her loving good-night kiss!"</div>
+<div>Papa placed his arms around her as he softly whispered this:</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Down in the City of Sighs and Tears, under the white light's glare,</div>
+<div>Down in the City of Wasted Years, you'll find your mama there,</div>
+<div>Wandering along where each smiling face hides its story of lost careers;</div>
+<div>And perhaps she is dreaming of you to-night, in the City of Sighs and Tears."</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The machinery gave a ponderous throb, the great black belts sagged and
+fell inert, the wheels whirred listlessly, clocks all over the great
+city began to toll for one more long day ended and gone, while the
+voices of the girl toilers rose superbly and filled the gathering
+stillness with the soft crescendo refrain:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Wandering along where each smiling face hides its story of lost careers;</div>
+<div>And perhaps she is dreaming of you to-night, in the City of Sighs and Tears&mdash;</div>
+<div>In the City of Sighs and Tears."</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>IN WHICH I ACQUIRE A STORY-BOOK NAME AND MAKE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF MISS HENRIETTA MANNERS</h3>
+
+<p>Before entering upon my second day's work at the box-factory, and before
+detailing any of the strange things which that day brought forth, I feel
+it incumbent upon me to give some word of explanation as to my
+whereabouts during the intervening night. It will be remembered that
+when I left the factory at the end of the first day, I had neither a
+lodging nor a trunk. I will not dwell upon the state of my feelings when
+I walked out of Thompson Street in the consciousness that if I had been
+friendless and homeless before, I was infinitely more so now. I will say
+nothing of the ache in my heart when my thoughts traveled toward the
+pile of ruins in Fourteenth Street, with the realization of my
+helplessness, my sheer inability even to attempt to do a one last humble
+little act of love and gratitude for the dead woman who had been truly my friend.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p><p>Briefly stated, the facts are these: I had, all told, one dollar, and I
+walked from Thompson Street straight to the Jefferson Market
+police-station, which was not a great distance away. I stated my case to
+the matron, a kindly Irishwoman. I was afraid to start out so late in
+the evening to look for a lodging for the night. I would have thought
+nothing of such a thing a few weeks previous, but the knowledge of life
+which I had gained in my brief residence in Fourteenth Street and from
+the advice of Mrs. Pringle had showed me the danger that lurked in such
+a course. The police matron said my fears were well founded, and she
+gave me the address of a working-girls' home over on the East Side,
+which she said was not the pleasantest place in the world for a
+well-brought-up girl of refinement and intelligence, such as she took me
+to be, but was cheap, and in which I would be sure of the protection
+which any young, inexperienced woman without money needs so badly in
+this wicked city. She wrote down the address for me, and I had started
+to the door of her little office when her motherly eye noticed how
+fagged out and lame I was&mdash;and indeed I could scarcely stand&mdash;and with a
+wave of her plump arm she brought me back to her desk.</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you stay here with me to-night?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> she asked. "You needn't
+mind; and if I was you I would do it and save my pennies and my tired
+legs. You can have a bite of supper with me, and then bundle right off
+to bed. You look clean tuckered out."</p>
+
+<p>So to my fast-growing list of startling experiences I added a night in
+the station-house; but a very quiet, uneventful night it was, because
+the matron tucked me away in her own little room. That is, it was quiet
+and uneventful so far as my surroundings were concerned, though I slept
+little on account of my aching bones. All night I tossed, pain-racked
+and discouraged; for, after all the long, hard day's work of the day
+before, Ph&oelig;be's card had only checked one dollar and five cents,
+which represented two persons' work. Such being the case, how could I
+expect to grow sufficiently skilful and expeditious to earn enough to
+keep body and soul together in the brief apprenticeship I had looked
+forward to? Unable to sleep, I was up an hour earlier than usual, and
+after I had breakfasted&mdash;again by the courtesy of the matron&mdash;I was off
+to work long before the working-day began.</p>
+
+<p>I had thought to be the first arrival, but I was not. A girl was already
+bending over her paste-pot, and the revelers of the "Ladies' Moonlight
+Pleasure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> Club" came straggling in by twos and threes. Some of the weary
+dancers had dropped to sleep, still wearing their ball-gowns and
+slippers and bangles and picture-hats, their faces showing ghastly white
+and drawn in the mote-ridden sunbeams that fell through the dirty
+windows. Others were busy doffing Cinderella garments, which rites were
+performed with astounding frankness in the open spaces of the big loft.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Henrietta, you had ought to been there," Georgiana gushed, dropping
+her lace-trimmed petticoats about her feet and struggling to unhook her
+corsets. "It was grand, but I'm tired to death; and oh, dear! I've
+another blow-out to-night, and the 'Clover Leaf' to-morrow night!" With
+a weary yawn, the society queen departed with her finery.</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't go to the ball?" I suggested to the girl addressed as
+Henrietta, and whom I now recalled as one who had worked frantically all
+the day before.</p>
+
+<p>"Me? No. I don't believe in dancing," she replied, without looking up.
+"Our church's down on it. I came early to get ahead with my order. You
+can do more work when there's not so many round."</p>
+
+<p>Such strict conformity to her religious scruples, combined with such
+pathetic industry, seemed to augur well for the superior worth of this
+tall, blonde,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> blue-eyed girl. I was anxious to make a friend of her,
+and accordingly proffered my services until Ph&oelig;be should come to
+claim me. She accepted gladly, and for the first time looked up and
+rewarded me with a smile. I caught a glimpse of an unprepossessing
+countenance&mdash;despite rather good features and fine hair&mdash;the most
+striking characteristics of which were a missing front tooth and lips
+that hung loose and colorless.</p>
+
+<p>As we worked, the conversation became cordial. She inquired my name, and
+I repeated the plain, homely Scotch-Irish cognomen that had been handed
+down to me by my forefathers.</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you get a pretty name?" she asked, in a matter-of-fact tone.
+"All the girls do it when they come to the factory to work. It don't
+cost no more to have a high-sounding name."</p>
+
+<p>Much interested, I protested, half in fun, that I didn't know any name
+to take, and begged her to suggest one. She was silent for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, last night," she went on&mdash;"last night I was reading a story about
+two girls that was both mashed on the same feller. He was rich and they
+was poor and worked, and one of them was called 'Rose Fortune.'"</p>
+
+<p>"That's a very pretty name," I remarked.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p><p>"Isn't it, though? Rose Fortune&mdash;ever so much prettier than your own.
+Say, why don't you take it, and I'll begin calling you by it right away."</p>
+
+<p>"And what's your name?" I ventured.</p>
+
+<p>"Mine? Oh, mine's Henrietta Manners; only," she added hastily&mdash;"only
+that's my real name. I was born with it. Now most of the girls got
+theirs out of story-books. Georgiana Trevelyan and Goldy Courtleigh and
+Gladys Carringford and Angelina Lancaster and Ph&oelig;be Arlington&mdash;them
+girls all got theirs out of stories. But mine's my own. You see," and
+she drew near that no other ear might hear the secret of her proud
+birth&mdash;"you see, Manners was my mother's name, and she ran away and
+married my papa against her rich father's wishes. He was a banker. I
+mean mama's papa was a banker, but my papa was only a poor young
+gentleman. So grandfather cut her off without a cent in his will, but
+left everything to me if I would take the name of Manners."</p>
+
+<p>The heroine of this strange romance stopped for breath, and if I had
+cherished any doubts of the truth of her story in the beginning, at
+least I was sure now that she believed it all herself; one glance into
+her steady blue eyes, in which a telltale moisture was already
+gathering, was proof of that.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p><p>"No, indeed," continued Miss Manners: "I haven't always been a
+working-girl. I used to go to boarding-school. I thought I'd be a
+governess or something, and once I tried to learn bookkeeping, but my
+eyes give out, and the figures mixed up my brain so, and then I got sick
+and had to come to this box-factory. But I'm the first Manners that ever worked."</p>
+
+<p>I was now thoroughly ashamed of my first unjust suspicions that
+Henrietta might not be strictly truthful, and I inquired with sincere
+interest as to the fate of her ill-starred family.</p>
+
+<p>"All dead and sleeping in our family vault," she replied wistfully. "But
+don't let us talk anything more about it. I get so worked up and mad
+when I talk about the Mannerses and the way they treated me and my poor parents!"</p>
+
+<p>The threatened spell with Henrietta's nerves was averted by a sudden
+turning on of the power, and the day's work began. Ph&oelig;be did not
+appear to claim me, and I worked away as fast as I could to help swell
+Henrietta's dividends.</p>
+
+<p>"I guess you can stay with her the rest of the day," Annie Kinzer said,
+stopping at the table. "The 'Moonlight Maids' must have been too much
+for Ph&oelig;be. Guess she won't show up to-day."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span></p><p>Henrietta was naturally delighted with the arrangement, which would add
+a few pennies to her earnings. "I only made sixty cents yesterday, and I
+worked like a dog," she remarked. "It was a bad day for everybody. We
+ought to make more than a dollar to-day. Ph&oelig;be says you're a hustler."</p>
+
+<p>Our job was that of finishing five hundred ruching-boxes. Henrietta
+urged me frequently to hurry, as we were away behind with the order. I
+soon discovered that for all her Manners blood and alleged gentle
+breeding, she was a harder taskmaster than the good-natured but plebeian
+Ph&oelig;be. Her obvious greed for every moment of my time, for every
+possible effort of my strength and energy, I gladly excused, however,
+when she revealed the fact that all her surplus earnings went toward the
+support of a certain mission Sunday-school in which she was a teacher.
+The conversation drifted from church matters to my own personal affairs.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it awful lonesome living alone in a room?"</p>
+
+<p>"How did you know I lived in a room?" I inquired in surprise, with the
+uncomfortable feeling that I had been the subject of ill-natured gossip.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Annie Kinzer told me. Say, I wouldn't tell her anything about my
+affairs. She's an awful clack."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p><p>We were silent for a moment, while I wondered if Henrietta, if Annie
+Kinzer, if any girl in all the world could ever guess how lonely I had
+been every moment since I had come to this great city to work and to
+live. Then came the unexpected.</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't you like to come and room with me?"</p>
+
+<p>"With you?" I was half pleased, half doubtful.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I've got plenty of room."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I couldn't afford it."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you can. I don't put on style. It won't cost us more than a dollar
+and a half a week for each&mdash;rent, eating, and everything else. I was
+thinking, as you're a learner, it will be a long time before you can
+make much, and you'd be glad to go halvers with somebody. Two can always
+live cheaper than one."</p>
+
+<p>A dollar and a half a week! That was indeed cheaper than I had been
+living. I had something less than two dollars in my purse, and pay-day,
+for me, was still a week off.</p>
+
+<p>And so I accepted the proposition, and by lunch-time the news was all
+over the factory that the new girl was to be Henrietta's room-mate.
+Annie Kinzer&mdash;everybody, in fact&mdash;approved, except, possibly, Emma. Emma
+was a homely, plainly dressed girl who had worked ten years here at
+Springer's. She<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> bore the reputation of being a prudey and a kill-joy.
+Thus far she had never deigned to look at me, but now she took occasion
+to pass the time of day when we met at the water-faucet, and asked, in a
+doubtful tone, how long I had known Henrietta Manners.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile we "cornered" and "tissued" and "laced" and "labeled." Higher
+and higher grew our pasteboard castle, which we built as children pile
+up brightly colored blocks. At eleven Henrietta sent me below for trimmings.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you like your job?" asked the young fellow who filled my order.
+This was strictly conventional, and I responded in kind. While Charlie
+cut tapes and counted labels, he made the most of his opportunity to
+chat. Dismissing, with brief comment, the weather and the peculiar
+advantages and disadvantages of box-making as a trade, he diplomatically
+steered the talk along personal and social lines by suggesting, with a
+suppressed sigh, the probability that I should not always be a
+box-maker. I replied heartily that I hoped not, which precipitated
+another question: "Is the day set yet?" My amused negative to the query,
+and intimation that I had no "steady," were gratefully received, and
+warranted the suggestion that, as a matter of course, I liked to go to balls.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p><p>"My pleasure club has a blow-out next Sunday night," he remarked
+significantly, as I gathered up my trimmings and departed.</p>
+
+<p>During my five minutes' absence the most exciting event of the day had
+occurred. Adrienne, one of the strippers, had just been carried away,
+unconscious, with two bleeding finger-stumps. In an unguarded moment the
+fingers had been cut off in her machine. Although their work does not
+allow them to stop a moment, her companions were all loud in sympathy
+for this misfortune, which is not rare. Little Jennie, the unfortunate
+girl's turner-in and fellow-worker for two years, wept bitterly as she
+wiped away the blood from the long, shining knife and prepared to take
+the place of her old superior, with its increased wage of five dollars
+and a half a week. The little girl had been making only three dollars
+and a quarter, and so, as Henrietta remarked, "It's a pretty bad
+accident that don't bring good to somebody."</p>
+
+<p>"Did they take her away in a carriage?" Henrietta asked of Goldy
+Courtleigh, who had stopped a moment to rest at our table.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I should say! What's the use of getting your fingers whacked off
+if you can't get a carriage-ride out of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and that's about the only way you'd ever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> squeeze a carriage-ride
+out of this company," commented Henrietta. "Now I've two lady-friends
+who work in mills where a sick headache and a fainting-spell touch the
+boss for a carriage-ride every time!"</p>
+
+<p>The order on which we worked was, like most of the others on the floor
+that day, for late-afternoon delivery. Our ruching-boxes had to be
+finished that day, even though it took every moment till six or even
+seven o'clock. Saturday being what is termed a "short-day," one had to
+work with might and main in order to leave at half-past four. This
+Henrietta was very anxious to do, partly because she had her Easter
+shopping to do, and partly because this was the night I was to be
+installed in my new quarters. Lunch-time found us still far behind.
+Therefore we did not stop to eat, but snatched bites of cake and
+sandwich as hunger dictated, and convenience permitted, all the while
+pasting and labeling and taping our boxes. Nor were we the only toilers
+obliged to forgo the hard-earned half-hour of rest.</p>
+
+<p>The awakening thunder of the machinery burst gratefully on our ears. It
+meant that the last half of the weary day had begun. How my blistered
+hands ached now! How my swollen feet and ankles throbbed with pain!
+Every girl limped now as she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> crossed the floor with her towering
+burden, and the procession back and forth between machines and tables
+began all over again. Lifting and carrying and shoving; cornering and
+taping and lacing&mdash;it seemed as though the afternoon would never wear to an end.</p>
+
+<p>The whole great mill was now charged with an unaccustomed excitement&mdash;an
+excitement which had in it something of solemnity. There was no sign of
+the usual mirth and hilarity which constitute the mill's sole
+attraction. There was no singing&mdash;not even Angelina's "Fatal Wedding."
+No exchange of stories, no sallies. Each girl bent to her task with a
+fierce energy that was almost maddening in its intensity.</p>
+
+<p>Blind and dizzy with fatigue, I peered down the long, dusty aisles of
+boxes toward the clock above Annie Kinzer's desk. It was only two. Every
+effort, human and mechanical, all over the great factory, was now
+strained almost to the breaking-point. How long can this agony last? How
+long can the roar and the rush and the throbbing pain continue until
+that nameless and unknown something snaps like an overstrained
+fiddle-string and brings relief? The remorseless clock informed us that
+there were two hours more of this torture before the signal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> to "clean
+up"&mdash;a signal, however, which is not given until the last girl has
+finished her allotted task. At half-past two it appeared hopeless even
+to dream of getting out before the regular six o'clock.</p>
+
+<p>The head foreman rushed through the aisles and bawled to us to "hustle
+for all we were worth," as customers were all demanding their goods.</p>
+
+<p>"My God! ain't we hustling?" angrily shouted Rosie Sweeny, a pretty girl
+at the next table, who supplied most of the profanity for our end of the
+room. "God Almighty! how I hate Easter and Christmas-time! Oh, my legs
+is 'most breaking," and with that the overwrought girl burst into a
+passionate tirade against everybody, the foreman included, and all the
+while she never ceased to work.</p>
+
+<p>There were not many girls in the factory like Rosie. Hers were the
+quickest fingers, the sharpest tongue, the prettiest face. She was
+scornful, impatient, and passionate&mdash;qualities not highly developed in
+her companions, and which in her case foreboded ill if one believed
+Annie Kinzer's prophecy: "That Rosie Sweeny 'll go to the bad yet, you mark my words."</p>
+
+<p>Three o'clock, a quarter after, half-past! The terrific tension had all
+but reached the breaking-point. Then there rose a trembling,
+palpitating<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> sigh that seemed to come from a hundred throats, and
+blended in a universal expression of relief. In her clear, high treble
+Angelina began the everlasting "Fatal Wedding." That piece of false
+sentiment had now a new significance. It became a song of deliverance,
+and as the workers swelled the chorus, one by one, it meant that the end
+of the day's toil was in sight.</p>
+
+<p>By four o'clock the last box was done. Machines became mute, wheels were
+stilled, and the long black belts sagged into limp folds. Every girl
+seized a broom or a scrub-pail, and hilarity reigned supreme while we
+swept and scrubbed for the next half-hour, Angelina and her chorus
+singing all the while endless stanzas of the "Fatal Wedding."</p>
+
+<p>Henrietta sent me for a fresh pail of water, which I got from the faucet
+in the toilet-room; and as I filled my bucket I made a mental inventory
+of my fellow-toilers' wardrobes. Hanging from rows of nails on all sides
+were their street garments&mdash;a collection of covert-cloth jackets, light
+tan automobile coats, black silk box-coats trimmed in white lace,
+raglans, and every other style of fashionable wrap that might be cheaply
+imitated. Sandwiched among the street garments were the trained skirts
+and evening bodices of the "Moonlight Maids" of the night <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>before, and
+which were to be again disported at some other pleasure-club festivity
+that Easter evening, now drawing near. Along the walls were ranged the
+high-heeled shoes and slippers, a bewildering display of gilt buckles
+and velvet bows; each pair waiting patiently for the swollen, tired feet
+of their owner to carry them away to the ball. The hats on the shelf
+above were in strict accord with the gowns and the cloaks and the
+foot-gear&mdash;a gorgeous assortment of Easter millinery, wherein the
+beflowered and beplumed picture-hat predominated.</p>
+
+<p>I hurried back with my bucket of water, hoping in my heart that the
+pleasure their wearers got out of this finery might be as great as the
+day's work which earned it was long and hard. And so indeed it must have
+been, if Henrietta was any authority on such questions.</p>
+
+<p>"I love nice clothes, even if I do have to work hard to get them," she
+remarked, as we turned into Bleecker Street a few minutes later, four
+one-dollar bills safely tucked away in her stocking. "But say, you ought
+to see my new hat. It's elegant," and drawing my arm through hers, my
+new room-mate hurried me through the Saturday-evening crowd of
+homeward-bound humanity.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>WHEREIN I WALK THROUGH DARK AND DEVIOUS WAYS WITH HENRIETTA MANNERS</h3>
+
+<p>It had been an ideal day for March&mdash;a day touched with pale-yellow
+sunshine in which one felt the thrill and the promise of the springtime,
+despite the chill east wind.</p>
+
+<p>Into the murky, evil-smelling squalor of Thompson Street this shy
+primrose sunshine had poured in the earlier part of the afternoon; but,
+being a north-and-south thoroughfare, it had all filtered out by
+half-past four, only to empty itself with increased warmth and glory
+into the east-and-west cross-streets, leaving Thompson dim and cold by
+comparison when Henrietta Manners and I emerged from Springer's.</p>
+
+<p>Henrietta wore a dusty picture-hat of black velvet with a straight
+ostrich feather and streamers of soiled white tulle, and a shabby
+golf-cape of blue and white check which was not quite long enough to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+conceal the big brass safety-pins with which her trained skirt was
+tucked up, and which she had forgotten to remove until we had gone some
+yards down the street. While we stopped long enough for her to perform
+this most important sartorial detail, my eye traversed the street before
+us, which with a gentle descent drops downward and stretches away toward
+the south&mdash;a long, dim, narrow vista, broken at regular intervals by
+brilliant shafts of gold streaming from the sunlit cross-streets, and
+giving to the otherwise squalid brick-walled ca&ntilde;on the appearance of a
+gay checkered ribbon. But if the March sunshine had deserted Thompson
+Street, the March winds still claimed it as their own. Up and down they
+had swept all day, until the morning mud on the cobblestones had been
+long dried up and turned to dust, which now swirled along, caught up in
+innumerable little whirlwinds that went eddying down the street.</p>
+
+<p>Grabbing up her demi-train in her bare hand, Henrietta and I also eddied
+down the street and were lost to view for a few moments in the whirlwind
+which struck us at the crowded corner of Bleecker Street.</p>
+
+<p>This whirlwind was the result partly of physical and partly of human
+forces. For it was Saturday night, and life was running at flood-tide
+all over the great city. Always tempestuous, always disturbed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> with the
+passion and pain and strife of its struggle to maintain the ground it
+had gained, never for one brief moment calm, even at its lowest
+ebb&mdash;now, on this last night of the long, weary week, all the currents
+and counter-currents of the worker's world were suddenly released. At
+the stroke of bell, at the clang of deep-mouthed gong, at the scream of
+siren whistle, the sluice-gates were lifted from the great human
+reservoirs of factory and shop and office, and their myriad toilers
+burst forth with the cumulative violence of six days' restraint.</p>
+
+<p>It was a shabby carnival of nations that jostled one another at this
+windy corner&mdash;Italian, Spanish, German, Slav, Jew, Greek, with a
+preponderance of Irish and "free-born" Americans. The general air was
+one of unwonted happiness and freedom. The atmosphere of holiday liberty
+was vibrant with the expectation of Saturday-night abandon to fun and
+frolic or wild carousal.</p>
+
+<p>For "the ghost had walked" through the workaday world that day, and
+everybody had his "envelop" in his pocket. It is a pleasant sensation to
+feel the stiff-cornered envelop tucked safely away in your vest pocket,
+or in the depths of your stocking, where Henrietta had hidden hers safe
+out of the reach of the wily pickpocket, who, she told me, was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> lurking
+at every corner and sneaking through every crowd on that Saturday
+evening, which was also Easter Eve.</p>
+
+<p>Easter Eve! I had almost forgotten the fact which accounted for this
+more than usual activity on the part of the hurrying crowds, and for the
+unmistakable holiday air which Bleecker Street displayed. As far as we
+could see, lined up on both sides of the curb were the pushcart
+peddlers, and at every step a sidewalk fakir, all crying their Easter wares.</p>
+
+<p>Henrietta lingered first about one pushcart, then about another, opening
+her gaudy side-bag, then shutting it resolutely and marching on,
+determined not to succumb to the temptation to squander her hard-earned
+pennies. She succeeded admirably until we came upon a picturesque
+Italian and his wife who were doing a flourishing business from a
+pushcart piled high with sacred images. Henrietta showed a lively
+interest in the cut prices at which they were going: ten cents for St.
+Peter in a scarlet robe and golden sandals; fifteen cents for St. John
+in purple; and only twenty-five for the Blessed Virgin in flowing blue
+clasping the Holy Babe.</p>
+
+<p>They were "dirt-cheap," Henrietta declared, as we watched the plaster
+casts pass over the heads of the crowd, out of which by and by emerged
+our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> shopmate, little Angela, clasping a Madonna under her arm and
+counting her change.</p>
+
+<p>The three of us resumed our homeward walk together, without any comment
+until Angela had satisfied herself about the correctness of her change.</p>
+
+<p>"What a slop you are!" remarked Henrietta, as her critical eye swept
+over the undeveloped little figure in the long, greasy black-taffeta
+coat, which, flapping open in front, disclosed the pasty surface of a
+drabbled blue skirt. "Why don't you never turn your skirt, Angela?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, what's the dif?" replied Angela. "There ain't no fellows going to
+look at me any more now."</p>
+
+<p>This reply, commonplace enough, might have passed unnoticed had there
+not been a note of tragedy in her deep contralto voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, what's the matter?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you know?" she demanded, scowling at Henrietta's silly, vacant "tee-hee."</p>
+
+<p>"Know? Know what?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"That I'm a grass-widow."</p>
+
+<p>"A grass-widow!" I echoed in astonishment, and looked upon the childish
+creature in sheer unbelief&mdash;for child I had always considered her. "Why,
+how old are you, anyway, Angela?"</p>
+
+<p>"Fifteen&mdash;I mean I'm 'most fifteen."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span></p><p>"And you're really married!" I exclaimed again, quite aghast and
+altogether innocent of the construction which Angela immediately put
+upon the qualifying adverb.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if you don't believe me look at that!" she cried, and stuck out a
+tiny, dirty hand, with finger-nails worn to the quick, and decorated
+with a gold band broad enough and heavy enough to have held a woman ten
+times Angela's weight and size in the bands of indissoluble matrimony;
+"I was married for fair, and I was married lawful. A priest did it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I didn't mean to question that," I hastened to apologize with some
+confusion. "Only you seemed so very young, I thought you were just joking me."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it's no joke to be married and have a baby, specially when you've
+got to s'port it," returned the girl, her lips still pouting.</p>
+
+<p>"And you've a baby, too&mdash;you!"</p>
+
+<p>The bedraggled little prima donna nodded; the pout on the lips blossomed
+into a smile, and a look of infinite tenderness transformed the tired,
+dark little face. "It's up to the cr&egrave;che&mdash;that's where I'm going now.
+The ladies keeps it awful good for me."</p>
+
+<p>"And it's such a lovely baby, too!" declared Henrietta, softly. "I seen it once."</p>
+
+<p>"She's cute; there's no lie 'bout that," assented<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> the little mother.
+"Look what I bought her&mdash;here, you hold this Peter a minute&mdash;Henrietta,
+just hang on to the Holy Virgin," and thrusting them into our hands, she
+opened the box under her arm and drew forth a gaily painted hen that
+clucked and laid a painted egg, to the uproarious delight of Henrietta.</p>
+
+<p>Henrietta meanwhile had begun counting the change in her side-bag.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't never like to break a bill unless I've got to," she remarked,
+returning the Holy Virgin to Angela's arms; "but I'm going to have one
+of them chickens too," and away she went after the fakir. A moment later
+she emerged from the crowd with a little brown box under her arm, and we
+three continued our walk westward along Bleecker, dropping little Angela
+at the corner of the street which was to lead her to the day-nursery
+where she would pick up her baby and carry it home.</p>
+
+<p>"That was a 'fatal wedding' for fair, wasn't it?" I remarked, as my eyes
+followed the little figure.</p>
+
+<p>But my companion paid no attention to my attempt to be facetious, if
+indeed she heard the remark at all. She seemed to be deep in a brown
+study, and several times I caught her watching me narrowly from the
+corner of her eye. I was already <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>beginning to have some misgivings as
+to the temperamental fitness of my strange "learner" and new-found
+friend as a steady, day-in-and-day-out person with whom to live and eat
+and sleep. And this feeling increased with every block we covered, for
+by and by I found myself studying Henrietta in the same furtive manner
+as she was evidently studying me.</p>
+
+<p>At last, when we had exchanged the holiday gaiety and the sunshine of
+Bleecker Street for a dark, noisome side-street, she broke out explosively:</p>
+
+<p>"Hope to God you ain't going to turn out the way my last room-mate did!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why? What did she do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Went crazy," came the laconic reply, and she shivered and drew the old
+golf-cape more closely about her shoulders; for the damp of the dark,
+silent tenements on either side seemed to strike to the marrow.
+Something in her manner seemed to say, "Ask no more questions," but
+nevertheless I pursued the subject.</p>
+
+<p>"Went crazy! How?"</p>
+
+<p>"I d'know; she just went sudden crazy. She come to Springer's one day
+just like you, and she said how she was wanting to find a place to board
+cheap; and she was kind of down in the mouth, and she come home with me;
+and all of a sudden in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> night I woke up with her screamin' and going
+on something fearful, and I run down and got the Dago lady in the
+basement to come up, and her man run for the police. They took her away
+to the lock-up in the hurry-up wagon, and the next day they said she was
+crazy,&mdash;clean crazy,&mdash;and she's in the crazy-house over on the Island now."</p>
+
+<p>"What island?" I asked, not with any desire to know this minor detail,
+but because I was too disturbed for the moment to make any other
+comment. It seemed to Henrietta, however, a most senseless question, for
+she remarked rather testily:</p>
+
+<p>"Why, just the Island, where they send all the crazy folks, and the
+drunks, and the thieves and murderers, and them that has smallpox."</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy! what an awful place it must be!" I cried. "And that's where the
+poor girl went?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's where she went&mdash;say, tell me honest now, didn't you run away?"</p>
+
+<p>"Run away! Where from?"</p>
+
+<p>"Run away from home&mdash;now didn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy, no! What put such an idea as that in your head?" I asked, laughing.</p>
+
+<p>"Fanny Harley did."</p>
+
+<p>"Who's Fanny Harley?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's the girl they took to the crazy-house."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p><p>"But," I argued, "is that any reason for you to suppose that I ran away
+from home too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yep, it is. You're ever so much like Fanny Harley. You talk just alike,
+and you've got just the same notions she had, from what I can make; and
+she did run away from home. She told me so. She lived up-state
+somewhere, and was off a farm just like you; and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But I'm not a farmer, and never was," I put in.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you told me yourself you was born in the country, didn't you?" and
+I saw there was no use trying to point out to Henrietta the difference
+between farmers and those born in the country, both of which were terms
+of contempt in her vocabulary. We were still threading the maze of
+strange, squalid streets which was to lead us eventually to the former
+brief abiding-place of Fanny Harley; and, filled with curiosity
+regarding my own resemblance to my unfortunate predecessor, I revived
+the subject by asking carelessly:</p>
+
+<p>"How is it I talk and act that makes me like Fanny Harley?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you 've got a kind of high-toned way of talking," she explained.
+"I don't mind the way you talk, though,&mdash;using big words and all that.
+That ain't none of our business, I tell the girls;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> but you do walk so
+funny and stand so funny, that it is all I can do to keep from bu'stin'
+out laughing to see you. And the other girls says it's the same with
+them, but I told them it was because you was just from the country, and
+that farmers all walk the same way. But really, Rose,&mdash;you're getting
+used to that name, ain't you?&mdash;you ought to get yourself over it as
+quick as you can; you ain't going to have no lady-friends in the factory
+if you're going to be queer like that."</p>
+
+<p>"But I walk as I always did. How else should I walk? How do I walk that
+makes me so funny?" I asked, mortified at the thought of my having been
+the butt of secret ridicule. Henrietta was cordial in her reply.</p>
+
+<p>"You walk too light," she explained; "you don't seem to touch the ground
+at all when you go along, and you stand so straight it makes my back
+ache to watch you."</p>
+
+<p>Then my mentor proceeded to correct my use and choice of diction.</p>
+
+<p>"And what makes you say 'lid' when you mean a cover? Why, it just about
+kills us girls to hear you say 'lid.'"</p>
+
+<p>"But," I remonstrated, aggravated by her silly "tee-hee" into defense of
+my English, "why<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> shouldn't I say 'lid' if I want to? It means just the
+same as cover."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if it mean the same, why don't you say 'cover'?" my "learner"
+retorted, with ill-disguised anger that I should question her authority;
+and I dropped the subject, and the remainder of the walk was continued in silence.</p>
+
+<p>It was growing more and more apparent that I had not made a wise
+selection in my room-mate, but it seemed too late to back out now&mdash;at
+least until I had given her a trial of several days.</p>
+
+<p>I felt as though I had obtained, as if by magic, a wonderfully
+illuminating insight into her nature and character during this short
+walk from the factory. I had thought her at the work-table a
+kind-hearted, honest toiler, a bit too visionary, perhaps, to accord
+with perfect veracity, and woefully ignorant, but with an ignorance for
+which I could feel nothing but sorrow and sympathy, as the inevitable
+result of the hard conditions of her life and environment. But now I
+recognized with considerable foreboding, not only all this, but much
+more besides. Henrietta Manners, that humble, under-fed, miserable
+box-maker, was the very incarnation of bigotry and intolerance, one by
+whom any idea, or any act, word, or occurrence out of the ordinary rut
+set by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>box-factory canons of taste and judgment, must be condemned with
+despotic severity. And yet, in the face of all these unpleasant
+reflections upon poor Henrietta's unbeautiful mental characteristics, I
+felt a certain shamefaced gratitude toward the kind heart which I knew
+still beat under that shabby golf-cape.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Henrietta had again lapsed into a silent, sullen mood, as she
+pitched along in the nervous, jerky, heavy-footed gait which she had
+urged me to emulate, and which I thought so hideous. I did not know
+then, but I do know now, that such gait is invariably a characteristic
+of the constitution in which there is not the proper co&ouml;rdination of
+muscular effort. In the light of knowledge gained in later years, I can
+now see in that long, slouching, shuffling figure, in that
+tallow-colored face with the bloodless, loose lips and the wandering,
+mystic eyes of periwinkle blue&mdash;I can see in that girl-face framed by a
+trashy picture-hat, and in that girl-form wrapped in the old golf-cape,
+one of the earth's unfortunates; a congenital failure; a female creature
+doomed from her mother's womb&mdash;physically, mentally, and morally doomed.</p>
+
+<p>I was, however, on this memorable Easter Eve most happily innocent of my
+Lombroso and my Mantagazza, else I had not been walking home with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+Henrietta Manners, in all the confidence of an unsophisticated
+country-girl. So much confidence did I have in my shop-mate that I did
+not yet know the name of the street on the West Side where my future
+home was, nor did I know any of the strange, dark, devious paths by
+which she led me through a locality that, though for the most part
+eminently respectable, is dotted here and there, near the river-front,
+with some of the worst plague-spots of moral and physical foulness to be
+found in New York.</p>
+
+<p>In later and more prosperous years I have several times walked into
+Thompson Street, and from that as a starting-point tried to retrace our
+walk of that night, bordering along old Greenwich Village, but as well
+have tried to unravel the mazes of the Cretan Labyrinth.</p>
+
+<p>The last westward street we traversed, dipping under the trellis of an
+elevated railroad, led straight into a lake of sunset fire out of which
+the smoking funnels of a giant steamship lying at her dock rose dark and
+majestic upon the horizon.</p>
+
+<p>A little cry of admiration escaped me at sight of the splendid picture,
+and I hoped secretly that our way might continue to the water's edge;
+but instead, reaching the line of the elevated, we turned in and
+followed the old, black street above which the noisy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> trains ran. The
+street itself presented the appearance of a long line of darkened
+warehouses, broken occasionally by a dismal-looking dwelling, through
+the uncurtained windows of which we could see slattern housewives busy
+getting supper.</p>
+
+<p>It was the most miserable and squalid of all the miserable and squalid
+streets I had thus far seen, and it had the additional disadvantage of
+being practically deserted of everything save the noise and smoke
+overhead. There were no foot-passengers, no human sounds. It was all so
+hideous and fearsome that after five minutes' walk I was not surprised
+to see Henrietta select the most wretched of all the wretched houses as
+the one we should enter. As we climbed the high stoop, I could see,
+through the interstices of rusted ironwork that had once been handsome
+balusters, the form of an Italian woman sitting in the basement window
+beneath, nursing a baby at her breast.</p>
+
+<p>"That's the lady what come up to help hold Fanny Harley," my room-mate
+remarked as we passed inside.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>IX</h2>
+
+<h3>INTRODUCING HENRIETTA'S "SPECIAL GENTLEMAN-FRIEND"</h3>
+
+<p>"Say! ain't you got no special gentleman-friend?"</p>
+
+<p>Henrietta's voice, breaking a pregnant silence, startled me so that I
+nearly jumped off the empty soap-box where for some minutes I had sat
+watching her bend over a smoking skillet of frying fat.</p>
+
+<p>An answer was not to be given unadvisedly, such was the moral effect of
+the question. It hadn't been asked in a casual way, but showed, by its
+explosive form of utterance, that it was the result not so much of a
+pent-up curiosity as of a careful speculation as to the manner in which
+I would receive it. So I tried to look unconscious, and at this critical
+juncture the thunder of an elevated train came adventitiously to my
+rescue and gave me a few moments in which to consider what I should
+reply. And as I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> considered unconsciously my eye took in an inventory of
+the room. The heavily carved woodwork hinted of the fact that it had
+once been a lady's bedchamber in the bygone days when this was a
+fashionable quarter of New York, and its spaciousness and former
+elegance now served rather to increase the squalor as well as to
+accentuate the barrenness of its furnishings. The latter consisted of
+two wooden boxes, one of which I sat upon; an empty sugar-barrel, with a
+board laid across the top; a broken-down bed in an uncurtained alcove; a
+very large, substantial-looking trunk, iron-bound and brass-riveted; and
+last, but not least, a rusty stove, now red-hot, which might well have
+been the twin sister of my own "Little Lottie" at the ill-fated
+Fourteenth-street house. This stove, connected with the flue by a small
+pipe, fitted into what had once been a beautiful open fireplace, but
+which was now walled up with broken bricks, and surmounted by a mantel
+of Italian marble sculptured with the story of Prometheus's boon to
+mankind, and supported on either end by caryatides in the shape of
+vestal virgins bearing flaming brands in their hands. Overhead the
+ceiling showed great patches of bare lath, where the plaster had fallen
+away, and the uncarpeted floor was strewn with bread-crumbs and marked
+by a trail<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> of coal-siftings from the stove to a closet-door from which
+the fire was replenished. The door to the closet was gone, and in its
+recess a pair of trousers hung limply, while Henrietta's scant wardrobe
+was ranged along the black-painted wall outside. The long, cobweb-hung
+windows, bare of blind or curtain, showed a black-mirrored surface
+against the batten shutters.</p>
+
+<p>All these details I could descry but dimly by the light of the smoking
+oil-lamp that sat on the mantelshelf above the stove, and which cast a
+ghastly light upon a row of empty bottles&mdash;the sole burden of the once
+spotless, but now sadly soiled, vestal virgins.</p>
+
+<p>Henrietta was bending over the smoking skillet, with the lamp-light
+falling across her pale face. As she boiled the coffee and fried the
+eggs I studied her profile sketched against the blue, smoky background,
+and tried in vain to grasp the secret of its fleeting, evanescent
+beauty. For beautiful Henrietta was&mdash;beautiful with a beauty quite her
+own and all the more potent because of its very indefinableness. I
+watched her as one horribly fascinated,&mdash;that high, wide white forehead,
+that weak chin, those soft, tremulous lips, on which a faint smile would
+so often play, and those great, wide eyes of blue that now looked purple
+in the lamp-light. And then, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>gradually, I saw, as I watched, an
+expression I had never seen there before; the wavering suggestion of the
+smile left the lips and they fell apart, loose and bloodless, with a
+glimpse of the missing front tooth. It was an expression that lasted but
+the fraction of a second, but it stamped her whole countenance with something sinister.</p>
+
+<p>Then Henrietta lifted the eggs, carried the coffee-pot across to the
+table, which was none other than the board-capped barrel, and went back
+for the lamp. All these things she insisted upon doing herself, just as
+she had stubbornly refused to allow me to help with the cooking of the supper.</p>
+
+<p>Setting the lamp down upon the improvised table, she threw open one of
+the shutters to let in a breath of fresh air, and as she did so the room
+was filled with the roar and dust of the elevated train which passed so
+close to our windows, and after it came a cold draft of air caused by
+the suction of the cars. Henrietta closed the window and returned to the table.</p>
+
+<p>Then I answered her question: "Well, that depends upon what you mean by
+gentleman-friend," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean just what I said," replied Henrietta, sliding an egg upon her
+plate and passing the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>remaining one to me. "I mean a <i>special</i>
+gentleman-friend."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, no; I guess I haven't. I used to know lots of boys in the country
+where I lived, but there isn't one of them I could call my special
+gentleman-friend, and I don't know any men here." I uttered this speech
+carefully, so as not to imply any criticism of Henrietta's use of the
+expression "gentleman-friend," nor to call down upon my own head her
+criticism for using any other than the box-factory vernacular in
+discussing these delicate amatory affairs.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, go and tell that to your grandmother!" she retorted, with a sly
+little laugh. "Don't none of the girls there have gentlemen-friends, or
+is farmers so different that they never stand gentlemen-friends to them?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, dear me, yes!" I answered hastily, trying to avoid the unpleasant
+<i>double entendre</i>, and choosing to accept it in its strictly explicit
+phase. "Why, certainly, the girls get married there every day. There are
+hardly any old maids in my part of the country. They get engaged almost
+as soon as they are out of short dresses, and the first thing you know,
+they are married and raising families." Then I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> added, "but have you got
+a gentleman-friend yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yep," she answered, nodding and pouring out the coffee; "I have a very
+particular gentleman-friend what's been keeping company with me for
+nearly a year, off and on."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" I cried, eager to turn the conversation toward Henrietta's
+personal affairs instead of my own, which I felt she completely
+misconstrued. "Do tell me about him; what is his name&mdash;and are you
+engaged to him yet?"</p>
+
+<p>"My! ain't you fresh, though?" she said; but there was cordiality in the
+rebuff. "I met him at the mission where I teach Sundays," she went on.
+"He's brother Mason, and he's the Sunday-school superintendent. He give
+me all that perfume on the mantel," and she pointed a dripping knife
+toward the row of empty bottles.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, is he in the perfumery business?" I asked innocently, my eyes
+ranging over the heterogeneous collection on the mantel. Henrietta took
+the remark as exceedingly funny, for she immediately fell into a
+paroxysm of tittering, choking over a mouthful of food before she could
+attain gravity enough to answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Lord! no; you do ask the funniest questions!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p><p>Thus checked, I did not press for further information as to brother
+Mason's vocation, but proceeded to satisfy my hunger, which was not
+diminished by the unappetizing appearance of the food on the barrel.</p>
+
+<p>It was a matter of great surprise to me to see how little Henrietta ate,
+and I was likewise ashamed of my own voracious appetite. Henrietta
+noticed this and frowned ominously.</p>
+
+<p>"God! but you do eat!" she commented frankly, poising her knife in air.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm hungry. I've worked hard to-day," I replied with dignity.</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe you won't eat so much, though, after a while," she said hopefully.</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe not," I agreed. "But you, Henrietta&mdash;you are not eating anything!"</p>
+
+<p>"Me? Oh, I'm all right. I'm eating as much as I ever do. The works takes
+away my hunger. If it didn't, I don't know how I'd get along. If I eat
+as much as you, I'd be likely to starve to death. I couldn't make enough
+to feed me. When I first begun to work in the factory I'd eat three or
+four pieces of bread across the loaf, and potatoes and meat, and be
+hungry for things besides; but after a while you get used to being<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+hungry for so long, you couldn't eat if you had it to eat."</p>
+
+<p>"How long have you been working?" I ventured.</p>
+
+<p>Henrietta put her cup on the table and shot a suspicious glance at me
+before she answered:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, off and on, and for five or six years, ever since my uncle died. He
+was my guardian&mdash;that's his house up there."</p>
+
+<p>I looked in the direction of Henrietta's pointed finger to a cheap
+chromolithograph that was tacked on the wall between the windows and
+immediately over the barrel where we were eating. I recognized it at
+once as a reproduction of a familiar scene showing a castle on the
+Rhine. I had seen the same picture many times, once as a supplement with
+a Sunday newspaper. That this stately pile of green and yellow
+variegated stones should be the residence of Henrietta's uncle and
+guardian seemed obviously but a bit of girlish fun, of a piece with her
+earlier talk regarding her aristocratic ancestry; for by this time I had
+construed that strange story into a hoax that was never meant to be taken seriously.</p>
+
+<p>But one glance now at Henrietta's face showed me my mistake. It was
+plainly to be seen that she had come to believe every word of what she had told me.</p>
+
+<p>My eye had traveled to the row of garments on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> pegs behind the door
+and had rested with curiosity upon a "lassie" bonnet and cloak.
+Henrietta did not wait for the question on my lips.</p>
+
+<p>"Them's my adjutant's uniform," she said, with a touch of pride. "You
+didn't know I used to be an adjutant in the Salvation Army, did you?"</p>
+
+<p>I shook my head.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I was, all right. Adjutant Faith Manners, that's what I was," and
+rising, she limped across the floor, and burrowing in the depths of the
+trunk, returned in a moment with an envelop which she handed me with the
+command to read its contents. The envelop, postmarked "Pittsburg, Pa.,"
+was addressed to Adjutant Faith Manners.</p>
+
+<p>"But how does it come you have two names?" I inquired.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," the girl replied slowly, "I thought as how it sounded better for
+a professing Christian to have some name like that, than Henrietta.
+Henrietta is kind of fancy-sounding, specially when you was an adjutant
+officer and was supposed to have give yourself to Jesus."</p>
+
+<p>I read the letter; it was a curious epistle, written in a beautiful,
+flowing hand, well worded, and complimenting Adjutant Manners upon her
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>"persistence in the good work for Jesus," and winding up with the offer
+of a small post, at a salary to be determined later on, in the Pittsburg
+barracks of the Salvation Army. The name of the writer, which for
+obvious reasons it is best not to divulge, was that of an officer who, I
+have since discovered, is well and favorably known in Pittsburg. The
+whole thing was a bewildering paradox. There was no doubt of its being a
+bona-fide letter, nor of Adjutant Faith Manners and my room-mate being
+one and the same person. And yet, how explain the ludicrous
+inconsistency of such an experience in the life of such a girl?</p>
+
+<p>I had opened my mouth to ask some question to this end, when we started
+as a heavy step resounded in the hallway outside. Then the latch
+rattled, the door swung open, and a thick-set, burly, bearded man stood
+upon the threshold. I screamed before I noticed that Henrietta regarded
+the new-comer quite as a matter of course.</p>
+
+<p>The man stood in the doorway, evidently surprised for the moment at
+seeing me there; then, closing the door behind him, he advanced
+awkwardly, tiptoeing across the floor, and sat down upon the edge of the
+bed without so much as a word.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you have a cup of coffee, brother Mason?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> asked Henrietta,
+shaking the pot to determine whether its contents would warrant the invitation.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care if I do, sister Manners," returned brother Mason, removing
+his hat as if it were an afterthought, and drawing forth a large red
+handkerchief with which he mopped his forehead and thick red neck.</p>
+
+<p>"This is my lady-friend, Rose Fortune," said Henrietta as she drained
+the coffee-pot, and nodding first to the visitor, then to myself; "my
+gentleman-friend, brother Mason."</p>
+
+<p>Brother Mason had risen and tiptoed forward, his hands thrust into the
+bulging pockets of his overcoat, whence he proceeded gravely to draw
+forth and deposit upon the barrel-top a heterogeneous love-offering, as
+follows: two oranges; a box of mustard; a small sack of nutmegs; a box
+of ground pepper; a package of allspice; a box containing three dozen
+bouillon capsules; a bottle of the exact size and label as the
+innumerable empty vessels on the mantel; a package of tea done up in
+fancy red-and-gold paper; and, last, a large paper sack of pulverized coffee.</p>
+
+<p>Henrietta now handed a cup to the donor of these gifts, which he
+accepted meekly and carried on tiptoe back to his place on the edge of the bed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span></p><p>Brother Mason drank his coffee with a great deal of unnecessary noise,
+while Henrietta gathered up the dishes, after again rebuffing me almost
+rudely for presuming to offer my services. Thus there was nothing left
+for me to do, apparently, but to sit on the soap-box and look at brother
+Mason, who regarded me in rather sheepish fashion over the top of his cup.</p>
+
+<p>I judged him to be a good-natured man on the near side of fifty. His
+close-cropped hair was an iron-gray, and his stubby beard and mustache a
+fierce red, the ferocity of which was tempered by the mildness of
+deep-set, small blue eyes. His general appearance would, I thought, have
+been more in accord with the driver of a beer-truck than anything so
+comparatively genteel as driving a grocer's wagon&mdash;his occupation, I
+discovered, which explained the source of his offerings to Henrietta.
+Despite the burliness of brother Mason, there was that about him which
+rather encouraged confidence than aroused suspicion, although it was
+difficult to reconcile him with the superintendence of a mission
+Sunday-school. The latter incongruity had just popped into my mind when
+he broke the silence by asking in a deep guttural, and with a vigorous
+nod in my direction as he put down his empty cup:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p><p>"Ha! Cat'lic?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," I answered, eager to break the embarrassing silence&mdash;"oh, no;
+I'm a Protestant."</p>
+
+<p>"Ha! But you be Irish, ben't you?"</p>
+
+<p>I laughed. "No; American!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ha! Father and mother Irish, mebbe?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, they were American, too; but my great-great-grandfather
+and-grandmother were Irish."</p>
+
+<p>"Aye, that's it! I knowed you was Irish the minute I seen them red
+cheeks, eh! sister Manners?" chuckled brother Mason in a rich brogue,
+rubbing his hands and looking across at my room-mate, who had been
+apparently oblivious to our conversation, as she washed and wiped the
+dishes out of a tin basin which I recognized as that from which we had
+washed our hands and faces after we got home from work. She now fixed
+the visitor with her periwinkle eyes, and replied severely:</p>
+
+<p>"I ain't got nothing to say against my lady-friend's looks, as you
+certainly know, brother Mason."</p>
+
+<p>Something in this answer&mdash;no doubt, a hint of smothered jealousy&mdash;made
+brother Mason throw his hand to his mouth and duck his head as he darted
+a sly look toward me. But I met the look with a serious face, and indeed
+I felt serious enough without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> getting myself into any imbroglio with
+this strange pair of lovers.</p>
+
+<p>"You're Irish, I suppose, Mr. Mason?" I asked when he had recovered his
+gravity after this mirth-provoking incident.</p>
+
+<p>"Me? I'm from County Wicklow, but I ain't no Cat'lic Irish. I'm a
+Methody. Cat'lic in the old country, Methody here. Got converted twenty
+years ago at one of them Moody and Sankey meetings&mdash;you've heard tell of
+Moody and Sankey, mebbe? Eh? Ha!"</p>
+
+<p>These latter ejaculations the Catholic apostate repeated alternately and
+with rhythmic precision as he proceeded to press tobacco into a clay
+pipe with numerous deft movements of his large red thumb, regarding me
+fixedly all the while.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes," I repeated many times, but not until he had lighted the pipe
+and drawn a deep whiff of it did brother Mason choose to regard his
+question as answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it was them that brought me to the mourners' bench, for fair. It
+was Moody and Sankey that did the damage; and I've got to say this much
+for them gentlemen, I've never seen the day I was sorry they did it. I'm
+the supe of a mission Sunday-school now, meself; and I've done me dirty
+best to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> push the gospel news along." Here he turned to Henrietta. "Be
+your lady-friend coming over to-morrow afternoon, sister Manners?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't hinder her, nor nobody's, doing what they like!" answered
+Henrietta, again with that air of severity, not to say iciness, in her
+manner; and I shifted myself uncomfortably on the box as I met her
+glance of patient scorn. She had now finished her dish-washing, and
+seated herself upon the edge of the box, which brother Mason had already
+appropriated with his large, clumsy bulk.</p>
+
+<p>"Come now, you do care, ye know you care!" he said gruffly, as he threw
+an arm carelessly across the girl's shoulder and patted her kindly; the
+scowl immediately left her face and her head dropped upon his brawny,
+red-shirted breast and snugly settled itself there, much to my
+embarrassment. Then, between long-drawn whiffs of the rank-smelling
+pipe, brother Mason descanted upon himself and his achievements,
+religious, social, financial, and political, with no interruption save
+frequent fits of choking on the part of poor Henrietta, whom even the
+clouds of rank smoke could not drive from her position of vantage.</p>
+
+<p>Brother Mason, so he informed me, was not only an Irishman and a
+Methodist, but a member of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> Tammany Hall and a not unimportant personage
+in the warehouses of the wholesale grocers for whom he drove the
+delivery wagon, and from whom, I now haven't a doubt in the world, he
+had stolen for the benefit of his lady-love many such an offering of
+sweet perfume and savory spice as he had carried her that Easter Eve. I
+found his talk eminently entertaining, with the charm that often goes
+with the talk of an unlettered person who knows much of life and of men.
+He was densely ignorant from the schoolmaster's point of view, and
+openly confessed to an inability to write his name; but his ignorance
+was refreshing, as the ignorance of man is always refreshing when
+compared with the ignorance of woman; which fact, it has often appeared
+to me, is the strongest argument in favor of the general superiority of
+the male sex. For hidden somewhere within brother Mason's thick, bullet
+head there seemed to be that primary germ of intelligence which was
+apparently lacking in the fair head snuggled on his breast. It was
+therefore with a mingled feeling of relief and regret that, after a
+couple of hours of conversation, I saw him gently push Henrietta away
+and announce his departure,&mdash;relief from the embarrassment which this
+open love-making had caused me, and regret that I was once more to be
+left alone with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> Henrietta in that dark, cavernous house. It was then
+after midnight, and Henrietta suggested, as brother Mason drew on his
+overcoat, that she accompany him as far as the corner saloon, where she
+wanted to buy a quarter-pint of gin; and they went off together, leaving me alone.</p>
+
+<p>When their resounding footsteps had died away down the stairs, I picked
+up the lamp and walked about, examining the shadowy corners of the room,
+peering into the black abyss of the alcove where the unwholesome bed
+stood, and not neglecting, like the true woman I was, to look underneath
+and even to poke under it with the handle of a broom. I raised the
+windows and threw open the batten-shutters, and through the darkness
+tried to measure the distance to the street below. Not only that, but I
+also speculated upon being able to climb out upon the railroad tracks,
+should the worst come to the worst.</p>
+
+<p>What worst? What did I fear? I don't know. I did not exactly know then,
+and I scarcely know now. It may have been the promptings of what is
+popularly termed "woman's intuition." No more do I know why I then and
+there resolved that I should sleep with my shoes and stockings on; and
+further, if possible, I determined to keep awake through the long night before me.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span></p><p>I closed the windows and returned to a further inspection of the room,
+stopping before the open trunk to examine some of the many books it
+contained. One by one I opened and examined the volumes; a few of them
+were romances of the Laura Jean Libbey school of fiction, but the
+majority were hymnals inscribed severally on the fly-leaf with the names
+"Faith Manners," "Hope Manners," "Patience Manners." Across the room the
+bottles on the mantel shone vaguely in the shadow. I carried the lamp
+over, and placing it in the little cleared-out space among them, began
+to examine the bottles with idle curiosity. "Wild Crab Apple," "Jockey
+Club," "Parma Violet," "Heliotrope," I read on the dainty labels,
+lifting out the ground-glass corks and smelling the lingering fragrance
+which yet attached to each empty vial. Of these there must have been two
+dozen or more.</p>
+
+<p>And there were other bottles, also empty, but not perfume-bottles. Of
+these others there were more than a dozen. At first I did not quite
+comprehend the purport of the printing on their labels, and it was not
+until I had studied some half a dozen of them that the sickening horror
+of their meaning dawned upon me fully. There was no mistaking them; the
+language was too unblushingly plain. They were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> the infamous nostrums of
+the malpractitioner; and in the light of this loathsome revelation there
+was but one thing for me to do: I had to get out of that room, and
+before Henrietta should return; and so, grabbing up my hat and jacket, I
+rushed in a panic out of the awful place into the midnight blackness of the empty street.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>X</h2>
+
+<h3>IN WHICH I FIND MYSELF A HOMELESS WANDERER IN THE NIGHT</h3>
+
+<p>In making my escape I had not counted upon my chances of meeting
+Henrietta returning from the saloon. I had thought of nothing but to get
+as far away as possible from the horror of it all. Dashing headlong down
+the street, I was going I knew not where, when suddenly Henrietta's
+vacuous "tee-hee" rang out in the darkness and echoed among the iron
+girders of the elevated trestle; and, looking ahead of me, I saw her in
+the light of the corner gas-jet coming toward me, a man on either side
+of her, and all three evidently in the best of spirits. I sank back into
+the darkness of a doorway that stood open, motionless until they had
+passed and their voices had died away.</p>
+
+<p>In the few minutes of waiting, I had collected my wits sufficiently to
+determine upon a plan of action. I would find my way back to the
+Jefferson Market,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> and stay there until daylight, and then go to the
+Working Girls' Home recommended by the police matron.</p>
+
+<p>But no sooner had I determined on this plan, which was really the only
+thing I could have done, than I heard women's voices close at hand; and
+before I could creep out of the doorway, two figures, groping up to it
+through the darkness, dropped down upon the threshold. They muttered and
+mumbled to each other for a little while, then their deep breathing told
+me they had fallen into a doze.</p>
+
+<p>Again and again I had crept out of my hiding-place, looked at the two
+bowed, crouching figures, which I could see only in vague outline, and
+then withdrew again into the comparative safety of the black hallway. I
+hesitated to waken them, and I could not creep over them asleep&mdash;not
+until I heard the low, guttural voice of a drunken man in the darkness
+above, and the uncertain shuffle of feet feeling their way to the head
+of the staircase. Then, my heart in my mouth, quite as much for the fear
+of what was before me as for what was fumbling about in the darkness
+behind, I came boldly out and stood over the huddled figures. Now I saw
+that they were old women, very old, and both fast asleep, with their
+arms locked about each other for protection against<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> the cold. Both were
+bare-headed and scantily dressed, and each wore a little wisp of gray
+hair drawn into a button at the back of her head, just as Mrs. Pringle
+had worn hers. I touched the nearest bundle on the shoulder. She awoke
+with a start, and peered around at me with a pitiful whimper. I
+explained that I only wanted to pass, and that she would oblige me very
+much to allow me to do so.</p>
+
+<p>"You want to git out, do ye, dearie? Well, you jist shall git out," came
+the rejoinder in a high, quavering voice, and slowly the old woman
+lifted herself, with many groans and "ouches" for her stiffened joints.</p>
+
+<p>"Dearie! dearie! I thought ye wuz the cop," the old crone went on, as
+she grasped my arm in a hand whose thinness I could feel through my thin
+jacket. "A nice arm it is ye have got, and yit ye don't speak as if ye
+be one of we uns, be you?" The withered hand held me as though in a
+vise, while I could feel the gin-laden breath of the unfortunate
+creature as she peered close into my face.</p>
+
+<p>"Please&mdash;please let me go!" I whispered, for I could hear the stumbling
+footsteps within near the bottom of the stairs. "Please let me go! I
+must go to the drug-store to find a doctor; some one is sick."</p>
+
+<p>"Sure, dearie, sure!" and the thin fingers relaxed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> their hold. "Do ye
+know where the drug-store is? and mightn't I make bold enough to ask to
+go with ye? It's late for a lady to be out, with the streets full of
+drunks and lazy longshoremen; and I know you <i>be</i> a lady."</p>
+
+<p>I was in a quandary. Naturally I did not want to accept this drunken
+woman's offer to pilot me, and yet I really had not the heart to offend
+the old creature, for there was genuine sympathy betrayed in her voice
+at the mention of sickness. She seemed to take my silence for
+acceptance, however; and placing her arm on mine, conducted me down the
+dark street. At the corner we passed under a gas-lamp, when we saw each
+other distinctly for the first time. She was dark and swarthy, with
+deep-set black eyes, and her thin, coarse, bristling gray hair, I
+noticed, was full of wisps of excelsior and grass box-packing. She was
+about sixty-two or-three, and had a spare, brawny frame with heavy,
+stooped shoulders. Evidently she had taken just as careful an inventory
+of my appearance, for we had not gone far before she was giving me all
+manner of good advice about taking care of myself in a big, wicked city,
+with repeated asseverations that she always knew a lady when she saw
+one, and that if I wasn't one of that enviable species, then her name
+wasn't Mrs. Bridget<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> Reynolds; and the latter being "a proper married
+woman and the mother of a family all dead now, God rest their souls!"
+who should know a lady better than she? And why was Mrs. Bridget
+Reynolds, a proper married and equally proper widowed woman of her
+reverend years, sitting upon a doorstep at three o'clock of a cold March
+morning? Och! God bless ye, just a little trouble with the landlord, no
+work for several weeks, and a recent eviction; a small matter that had
+often happened before, and was like as not to happen ag'in, God willing!
+And who was Mrs. Bridget Reynolds's sleeping mate left behind on the
+doorstep? Divil a bit did Mrs. Bridget Reynolds know about her, only
+that she had found her that night in the empty warehouse, where she had
+gone like herself to sleep, among the packing-cases, under the straw and
+excelsior, which made a bed fit for a queen, and where they might still
+have been taking their ease had not a heartless cop chased them out, bad luck to him!</p>
+
+<p>Such was the gist of Mrs. Reynolds's discourse. I have not the courage
+to attempt to transcribe her rich brogue and picturesque phraseology;
+and even were I able to do so, it could give the reader no adequate idea
+of the wealth of optimism and cheerfulness that throbbed in her
+quavering voice. Hers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> could be a violent tongue, too, as the several
+men who accosted us on our dark way discovered at their first approach
+to familiarity; and on one occasion, when a drunken sailor leered up to
+my side, Mrs. Bridget spat at him like an angry tabby-cat. Somehow, I no
+longer felt afraid under her protection and guidance.</p>
+
+<p>At last, after a very long walk, we came in sight of the brightly
+lighted windows of a drug-store, and Mrs. Reynolds said we were on
+Bleecker Street. I had now to explain that my asking the way to a
+drug-store had been merely a bit of subterfuge, which I did in fear and
+trembling as to how Mrs. Reynolds would accept such deception on my
+part. But she was all good humor.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure, dearie, it's all right! I'm glad to do a good turn for yez, being
+as you're a poor body like mesilf, even if ye air a lady!"</p>
+
+<p>We were now standing in the glare of the big colored-glass carboys in
+the drug-store window at the corner of Bleecker Street and some one of
+its intersecting alleys. It was now four in the morning, and the streets
+were almost deserted. My companion smiled at me with the maudlin
+tenderness which gin inspires in the breast of an old Irishwoman, and as
+we stood irresolute on the corner I noticed how<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> thinly clad she was.
+The sharp wind wrapped her calico skirt about her stiffened limbs, and
+her only wrap was a little black knitted fascinator which did not meet
+over the torn calico blouse.</p>
+
+<p>"A wee nip of gin would go right to the spot now, wouldn't it, dearie?"
+the old soul asked wistfully, which reminded me of something I had
+forgotten: that I still had my precious dollar and a half snugly stowed
+away in my petticoat pocket. So I suggested that we go to a lunch-room
+and have a good meal and a cup of hot coffee, and sit there till
+daylight, which now was not far off.</p>
+
+<p>The prospect of something to eat and something hot to drink infused
+great cheerfulness into my strange chaperon; she grasped my arm with the
+gaiety of a school-girl, and we walked eastward until we came to a dairy
+lunch-room upon the great plate-glass windows of which was enameled in
+white letters a generous bill of fare at startlingly low prices. The
+place was of the sort where everybody acts as his own waiter, buying
+checks for whatever he wants from the cashier and presenting them at a
+long counter piled up with eatables. Mrs. Reynolds was modesty itself in
+accepting of my bounty.</p>
+
+<p>When we had finished it was daylight, and I parted from my duenna at the
+door, she with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>innumerable terms of maudlin endearment, and an
+invocation to all the saints in the calendar that they should keep a
+kindly eye upon me. As to my own feelings, I felt heartless to be
+obliged to leave the poor creature with nothing more than a
+twenty-five-cent piece, and with no proffer of future help&mdash;if, indeed,
+she was not beyond help. But I was powerless; for I was as poor as she
+was. I had suggested her applying to the authorities for aid, but she
+had received it scornfully, even indignantly, declaring that Mrs.
+Bridget Reynolds would die and rot before she'd be beholden to anybody
+for charity. Anything in the shape of organized authority was her
+constitutional enemy, and the policeman was her hereditary foe.
+Hospitals were nefarious places where the doctors poisoned you and the
+nurses neglected you in order that you should die and furnish one more
+cadaver to the dissecting-rooms; almshouses were the last resort of the
+broken in heart and spirit, institutions where unspeakable crimes were
+perpetrated upon the old and helpless. Therefore, was it any wonder this
+independent old dame of Erin preferred deserted warehouses and dark
+doorways as shelter?</p>
+
+<p>And so, early in this Easter morning, I left Mrs. Bridget Reynolds at
+the door of the Bleecker Street<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> lunch-room, she to go her way and I to
+go mine. I looked back when I had got half a block away, and she was
+still standing there, apparently undetermined which way to turn. I
+watched a moment, and presently she ambled across the street and rattled
+the door of the "ladies'" entrance to the saloon on the corner. Then I
+turned my face toward the reddening east, against which the shabby
+housetops and the chimneys and the distant spires and smokestacks
+stretched out in a broken, black sky-line. I was going to find the home
+for working girls which the good matron at Jefferson Market had
+recommended, and the address of which I still had in the bottom of my purse.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>XI</h2>
+
+<h3>I BECOME AN "INMATE" OF A HOME FOR WORKING GIRLS</h3>
+
+<p>The spirit of the early Easter Day had breathed everywhere its own
+ineffable Sabbath peace, and when at last I emerged into Broadway, it
+was to find that familiar thoroughfare strangely transformed. On the six
+days preceding choked with traffic and humming with ten thousand noises,
+it was now silent and deserted as a country lane&mdash;silent but for the
+echo of my own footsteps upon the polished stone flagging, and deserted
+but for the myriad reflections of my own disheveled self which the great
+plate-glass windows on either side of the street flashed back at me.</p>
+
+<p>My way lay northward, with the spire of Grace Church as a finger-post.
+Grace Church had become a familiar landmark in the preceding weeks, so
+often had I walked past it in my hopeless quest, and now I approached it
+as one does a friend seen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> suddenly in a crowd of strangers. The fact
+that I was approaching an acquaintance, albeit a dumb and unseeing one,
+now made me for the first time conscious of my personal appearance so
+persistently reflected by the shop windows. Before one of them I stopped
+and surveyed myself. Truly I was a sorry-looking object. I had not been
+well washed or combed since the last morning at Mrs. Pringle's house;
+for two days I had combed my long and rather heavy hair with one of the
+small side-combs I wore, and on neither morning had I enjoyed the luxury
+of soap. And two successive mornings without soap and the services of a
+stout comb are likely to work all sorts of demoralizing transformations
+in the appearance of even a lady of leisure, to say nothing of a girl
+who had worked hard all day in a dirty factory.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately the street was deserted. I stepped into the entrance of a
+big, red-sandstone building, and standing between the show-windows, took
+off my hat, laid it on the pavement, and proceeded to unroll my hair and
+slick it up once more with the aid of the side-comb, of which I had now
+only one left, having lost the other somewhere in my flight from
+Henrietta's. That I should have thought to put on my hat in preparing
+for that flight I do not understand,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> for I forgot my gloves, a
+brand-new pair too; my handkerchief; and, most needful of all else, my
+ribbon stock-collar, without which my neck rose horribly long and thin
+above my dusty jacket-collar. Looking at it ruefully, I began to feel
+for the first time what was for me at least the very quintessence of
+poverty&mdash;the absolute impossibility of personal cleanliness and of
+decent raiment. I had known hunger and loneliness since I had come to
+New York, but never before had I experienced this new, this infinitely
+greater terror&mdash;lack of self-respect. That I had done nothing to lower
+my self-respect had nothing whatever to do with it, since self-respect
+is often more a matter of material things than of moral values. It is
+possible for a hungry woman to walk with pride, and it is possible for
+the immoral and utterly degraded woman to hold her own with the best of
+her sisters, when it comes to visible manifestation of self-respect, if
+only she is able to maintain her usual degree of cleanliness and good
+grooming. But unacquainted with soap for two days! and without a collar!
+How could I ever summon courage to present myself to anybody in such a
+condition? Had I been an old woman, I mightn't have cared. But I was a
+girl; and, being a girl, I suffered all of a girl's heartache and
+melancholy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> wretchedness when I remembered that it was Sunday and that
+there was no hope of buying either collar or comb for twenty-four
+hours&mdash;if, indeed, I dared to spend any of my few remaining dimes and
+nickels for these necessities, which had suddenly soared to the heights
+of unattainable luxuries.</p>
+
+<p>In the full consciousness of my disreputable appearance, I hung in the
+doorway, reluctant to fare forth in the cruel light of the thoroughfare.
+Hitherto I had had the street all to myself, so it had not mattered so
+much how I looked. But now an empty car hurtled by, its gong breaking
+for the first time the silence of the long vista stretching away and
+dipping southward to the Battery. Then another car came speeding along
+from the opposite direction, whirled past Grace Church, and northward
+around the curve at Fourteenth Street; and following in the wake of the
+car, a hansom-cab with a jaded man and woman locked in each other's arms
+and fast asleep. As the latter passed close to the curb, I drew into the
+embrasure of the door as far as possible so as to avoid being seen by
+the cabman&mdash;as if it made the least difference whether he saw me or not;
+but such is the all-absorbing self-consciousness and vanity of girlhood.
+It was then that I noticed for the first time the glaring sign that had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+been staring at me during all these ineffectual attempts to "primp."</p>
+
+<p>"Wanted&mdash;Girls to learn flower-making. Paid while learning. Apply Monday
+morning at nine o'clock."</p>
+
+<p>I repeated the street-number over and over, so as to make sure of
+remembering it; and then, screwing up my courage, walked hurriedly up
+the street, trying to ignore the glances which were cast at me by
+occasional pedestrians. I happened to think of a large dairy lunch-room
+on Fourteenth Street where I had several times gone for coffee and
+rolls, and where the cashier and waitresses knew me by sight, and where
+I thought, by investing in a cup of coffee, I might tidy up a bit in the
+toilet-room. If only the place should be open on Sunday morning!</p>
+
+<p>And it was. The cashier had just stepped into her cage-like desk, and
+the waitresses were lined up in their immaculate white aprons and lace
+head-dresses. I was their first customer, apparently. The cashier, a
+pretty, amiable girl, suppressed any surprise she may have felt at my
+appearance, and greeted me with the same dazzling smile with which she
+greeted every familiar face. I explained to her what I wanted to do,
+apologizing for my slovenliness. She was all sympathetic attention, her
+eyes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> snapped with good-humored interest, and she told me to go back and
+take all the time I wanted to wash up. In a few minutes she sent me, by
+one of the waitresses, a fresh piece of soap, a comb, a bit of
+pumice-stone, a whisk-broom, a nail-file, a pair of curved
+nail-scissors, a tiny paper parcel containing some face-powder, and,
+wonder of wonders, a beautifully clean, fresh, shining collar!</p>
+
+<p>Before the big, shimmering mirrors I washed and splashed to my heart's
+content and to the infinite advantage of my visage. How delicious it was
+to see and hear and feel the clear, hot water as it rushed from the
+silver faucet into the white porcelain bowl! I washed and I washed, I
+combed and I combed, until there was absolutely no more excuse for doing
+either; then I powdered my face, just enough to take the shine off,
+filed my finger-nails, brushed my clothing, put on my borrowed collar,
+and stepped out into the eating-room, feeling, if not looking, like the
+"perfect lady" which the generous-hearted cashier declared I resembled
+"as large as life."</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind about the collar; you can just keep it," she said when I
+returned her toilet articles. "It's not worth but a few cents, anyway,
+and I've got plenty more of them.... Don't mention it at all; you're
+perfectly welcome. I didn't do <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>anything more for you than I'd expect
+you to do for me if I was in such a pickle. If we working girls don't
+stand up and help one another, I'd like to know who's going to do it for us.... So long!"</p>
+
+<p>"So long!" It was not the first time that I had heard a working girl
+deliver herself of that laconic form of adieu, and heretofore I had
+always execrated it as hopelessly vulgar and silly, which no doubt it
+was and is. But from the lips of that kind-hearted woman it fell upon my
+ears with a sort of lingering sweetness. It was redolent of hope and good cheer.</p>
+
+<p>The home for working girls I found, not very far away from this
+lunch-room, in one of the streets south of Fourteenth Street and well
+over on the East Side. It was a shabby, respectable, unfriendly-looking
+building of red brick, with a narrow, black-painted arched door. On the
+cross-section of the center panel was screwed a silver plate, with the
+name of the institution inscribed in black letters, which gave to the
+door the gruesome suggestion of a coffin set on end.</p>
+
+<p>A polite pull at the rusty handle of the bell-cord brought no response,
+and I rang again, a little louder. A chain was rattled and a bolt drawn
+back. The lid of the black coffin flew open, disclosing, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> the
+suddenness of a jack-in-the-box, a withered old beldam with a large
+brass key clutched in a hand that trembled violently with palsy.</p>
+
+<p>She grumbled inarticulately, and with a jerk of her head motioned me
+into a small room opening off the hall, while she closed and locked the
+door with the great brass key.</p>
+
+<p>The little reception-room, or office, was no more cheerful than the
+front door, and, like it, partook somewhat of an ecclesiastical aspect.
+Arranged in a sort of frieze about the room were a series of framed
+scriptural texts, all of which served to remind one in no ambiguous
+terms of the wrath of God toward the froward-hearted and of the eternal
+punishment that awaits unrepentant sinners. And then, at intervals, the
+vindictive utterances were broken by pictures&mdash;these, too, of a
+religious or pseudo-religious nature.</p>
+
+<p>One of these pictures particularly attracted my attention. It was
+entitled "Hope leaning upon Faith," and showed an exceedingly
+sentimental young girl leaning heavily upon an anchor, her eyes lifted
+heavenward, where the sun was just breaking through black clouds, and
+all against a perspective of angry sea. I was trying to apply its
+symbolism to my own case, when a sharp, metallic voice inquired abruptly:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span></p><p>"What did you wish?"</p>
+
+<p>I turned about quickly. A tall, hard-faced woman of forty or thereabouts
+stood in the door, and looked at me coldly through spectacles that
+hooked behind ears the natural prominence of which was enhanced by her
+grayish hair being drawn up tightly and rolled into a "bun" on the very
+top of the head. She was the personification of neatness, if such be the
+word to characterize the prim stiffness of a flat-figured, elderly
+spinster. She wore large, square-toed, common-sense shoes, with low
+heels capped with rubber cushions, which, as I was shortly to discover,
+had earned for the lady the sobriquet of "Old Gum Heels." What her real
+name was I never found out. Nobody knew. She was the most hated of all
+our tormentors; and in all of the weeks I was to remain in the house
+over which she was one of the supervisors, I never heard her referred to
+by any other than the very disrespectful cognomen already quoted. But I am anticipating.</p>
+
+<p>"I would like to get board here," I replied timidly, for the very manner
+of the woman had in it an acid-like quality which bit and burned the
+sensibilities like vitriol does the flesh.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you any money?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not very much."</p>
+
+<p>"How much?" she demanded.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span></p><p>"About one dollar."</p>
+
+<p>"What baggage have you?"</p>
+
+<p>"None," I replied, and related as well as my embarrassment would allow
+me the story of the fire and of my flight from Henrietta, not forgetting
+the generosity of the cashier in the dairy lunch-room. She listened in
+silence, and when I had finished I thought I saw the repression of a
+smile, which may or may not have been of the sardonic order. Then she
+motioned me to follow her through the long, gloomy hall to the rear of
+the house, where, turning an angle, we came to a staircase down which a
+flood of sunlight streamed from the big window on the landing. The
+sunlight showed walls of shimmering whitewashed purity and unpainted
+oaken stairs scoured white as a bone. "Old Gum Heels" stopped here, and
+was beginning to give me directions for finding the matron's room on the
+floor above, when a door at the back opened and a very little girl
+appeared with a very large pitcher of hot water, which she held tight in
+her arms as though it were a doll, jiggling at every step a little of
+the contents upon the floor.</p>
+
+<p>"Julia, take this girl along with you to Mrs. Pitbladder's room, and
+tell her that she wishes to make arrangements about board and lodging."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+And then to me: "Mrs. Pitbladder is the matron. You will pay your money
+to her, and she will tell you the rules and regulations for
+inmates.&mdash;And then, Julia, hurry back to the kitchen; I'll need you right away."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, ma'am," replied the child, timidly, with a shy glance at me as she
+proceeded laboriously up the stairs. At the landing she stopped to draw
+breath, putting the pitcher upon the floor and relaxing her thin little
+arms. She was such a mite of a child, hardly more than eight or nine, if
+judged from the size of the spindly, undeveloped figure. This was
+swaddled in the ugly apron of blue-checked gingham, fastened down the
+back with large bone buttons, and so long in the sleeves that the little
+hands were all but lost, and so long in the skirt that only the ends of
+the small copper-toed shoes showed beneath. Judged, however, by the
+close-cropped head and the little sallow face that surmounted the
+aproned figure, she might have been a woman of twenty-five, so maturely
+developed was the one, so shrewd and knowing the other. The child leaned
+her shoulders upon the whitewashed wall and stared at me in bold, though
+not unfriendly curiosity, which, undoubtedly, I reciprocated. She was
+evidently sizing me up. I smiled, and she screwed her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> full, sensitive
+mouth into a judicial expression, puckering her forehead; then, in a
+deep, contralto voice, she spoke. What she said I didn't hear, or rather
+didn't grasp, in my wonder at the quality and timbre of that great
+voice, which, issuing from the folds of the checked apron, seemed fairly
+to fill the big hall below and the stair-well above with a deep,
+beautiful sound. I apologized and asked her to repeat what she had said.</p>
+
+<p>"Your skirt&mdash;it's so stylish," she said, and the little hand stole out
+and began stroking the snugly-fitting serge of that very unpretentious garment.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm very glad you like it," I laughed, "for it's the only skirt I
+have"; and I picked up the heavy pitcher and carried it up the rest of
+the way, the child following me, holding up her apron skirts with both
+hands to keep from stumbling, and making a ringing, metallic noise as
+the copper toes struck the wood at every rise. She took the pitcher at
+the head of the stairs without comment, but with a look full of
+diffident gratitude. Stopping before one of the doors, the child rapped
+timidly&mdash;so timidly, in fact, that it could scarcely be heard. No answer
+coming, she rapped again, this time a little louder, and a woman's
+shrill voice screamed, "Come in!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p><p>"Mis' Pitbladder, the lady down-stairs says as this is a young girl
+what wants to have a talk with youse about coming here," my little guide
+announced all in one breath, and almost before the door had entirely
+swung open upon the group within, consisting of an old lady and two
+little girls. The old lady was in a comfortable state of dishabille; the
+little girls each wore big checked gingham aprons like Julia's, and
+buttoned down the back with the same big, white bone buttons. One of
+them was waving Mrs. Pitbladder's hair with a crimping-iron which she
+heated in a gas-jet before the bureau; the other child was laboriously
+working at one of the pudgy hands with a pair of nail-scissors.</p>
+
+<p>"Come in, come in, and don't stand there with the door open," mumbled
+the bowed figure in the armchair, who held a twisted bit of uncrimped
+forelock between her teeth to keep it from getting mixed with what was
+already waved, and which fell over her face so that I could not see her features.</p>
+
+<p>"So you want to come here to board with us, my dear?" began the masked
+one, which was the signal for an exchange of grave winks between the
+hairdresser, the manicure, and the little slavey, Julia, who was pouring
+the hot water into the pitcher on the washstand.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span></p><p>"If I could arrange it," I replied quickly, taking courage from the
+woman's kindly manner of putting the question, which was in such
+startling contrast to that of the dragon down-stairs.</p>
+
+<p>"You are a working girl, are you, my dear?"</p>
+
+<p>"I want to be. I'm looking for work now, and I hope to get a job in a
+few days. I understand your rates are very low, and that I can live here
+cheaper than almost anywhere else."</p>
+
+<p>"And who sent you here, my dear?"</p>
+
+<p>In answer to this I told her my story almost in totality, leaving out
+only such details as could not possibly have concerned her. Perfect
+candor, I was fast learning, was the only way in which one in my
+desperate situation could hope for any degree of sympathetic treatment,
+as the time for all silly pride was passed.</p>
+
+<p>Then Mrs. Pitbladder explained the system upon which the house was run.
+I could have a room all to myself for a dollar and a half a week, or I
+could sleep in the dormitory for ten cents a night, or fifty cents a
+week; all terms payable in advance. The latter fact she was particular
+to impress upon me. As to food, she named a price which fairly took away
+my breath. Six cents each for meals&mdash;six cents each for breakfast,
+dinner, and supper! I said<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> at once I would become a boarder, and that I
+would take a cot in the dormitory, for which I would pay from night to night.</p>
+
+<p>At this juncture the girl who answered to the name of May finished
+undulating the last strand of gray hair, and as she lifted it off her
+mistress's face that lady raised her head and we looked at each other
+for the first time. She was somewhere between sixty-five and seventy,
+and very fat. Mrs. Pitbladder's face was a surprise to me, for all it
+was a round, red face&mdash;the very sort of face in which one would have
+expected good nature to repose. Its predominating features were a huge,
+beaked nose and high cheek-bones which encroached to an alarming degree
+upon the eye-sockets, wherein little dark, furtive eyes regarded me
+fixedly. It was a face which even the most unsophisticated observer
+could scarcely fail to characterize as that of a woman hardened in every
+sort of petty tyranny, a woman who, having the power to make others
+uncomfortable, found infinite pleasure in doing so, quite apart from any
+motive of selfish interest. To be sure, I did not read all this in Mrs.
+Pitbladder's face by the end of our first meeting. The supreme question
+to be settled, the only one which had for me a vital interest then, was
+how long I might still put off<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> utter destitution in the event of my not
+finding work within the ensuing week.</p>
+
+<p>The terms were always in advance, Mrs. Pitbladder again repeated, as she
+entered my name and age in a long book which May brought from the dark
+mahogany desk that matched the rest of the well-made furniture in the
+spacious room. I would now pay her, she said, ten cents for the bed I
+was to sleep in that night, and my board money would be paid meal by
+meal to the woman in charge of the dining-room. I gave her a
+twenty-five-cent piece. I had remaining three other silver quarters. I
+watched my twenty-five-cent piece drop into Mrs. Pitbladder's purse, and
+heard the greedy mouth of that receptacle snap shut.</p>
+
+<p>"Mintie," Mrs. Pitbladder spoke briskly, "show this girl to the
+sitting-room, and then go and find Mrs. Lumley and tell her to come to me at once."</p>
+
+<p>Mintie, who had now finished lacing the matron's shoes, rose eagerly
+and, with a shy glance toward me, made for the door. I hesitated, and
+looked at Mrs. Pitbladder.</p>
+
+<p>"You may go now," she said, with a wave of the pudgy hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me," I replied, considerably abashed, quite as much by the
+curious looks of the little girls<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> as by the annoyance of having to
+remind the matron about the fifteen cents change still due me&mdash;"excuse
+me, but I gave you twenty-five cents."</p>
+
+<p>"And I gave you your change, my dear," the matron returned suavely but decisively.</p>
+
+<p>"I beg your pardon for contradicting you," I replied firmly, and without
+taking my eyes from hers, which blinked unpleasantly. "You did <i>not</i>
+give me any change."</p>
+
+<p>"Look in your purse and see," said Mrs. Pitbladder.</p>
+
+<p>"It is quite unnecessary," I replied; "but I will do so to satisfy you";
+and I opened the purse again and showed my three remaining silver
+pieces, which to further satisfy her I took out upon my palm and then
+turned the purse's lining inside out.</p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. Pitbladder did not seem impressed. I for my part resolved to be
+equally insistent, inspired as I was with the determination that comes
+to desperate people. There were fifteen cents due me, and nobody should
+cheat me out of a single one of those precious pennies if I could
+possibly prevent it. There was a short silence in which we took each
+other's measure, the children looking on in evident enjoyment of the
+situation. Finally the old lady opened the purse again and gave me the
+change due,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> though she grumblingly maintained that it was I, not she,
+who was in error.</p>
+
+<p>When the door closed at last upon us, my small companion clutched my
+hand and gave it a jubilant squeeze. "Golly! that did me good," she
+whispered as we were going down-stairs. "She always lets on to make
+mistakes about the girls' change, only most of 'em is so scairt of her
+they just let her beat them out of it."</p>
+
+<p>While the child went to find Mrs. Lumley I waited in the sitting-room.
+It was an empty, ugly place, with bare floors and whitewashed walls, the
+latter decorated, like those of the office, with framed scriptural
+texts. Its furniture consisted of several long, slat-bottomed settees
+and a single large rocking-chair which, crowded with children, was
+swinging noisily over the bare boards. At our entrance the chair stopped
+rocking, and one of the children climbed out.</p>
+
+<p>It was Julia. She came promptly over to my side, while a half-dozen of
+the other children jumped off the benches and ran to the rocking-chair
+to squabble over the question of who should take the vacant place.</p>
+
+<p>"Did yez have a row?" she asked eagerly. "Say, did yez?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p><p>I evaded the question, thinking it neither advisable nor proper to
+satisfy the curiosity of the little mite. To divert her attention, I
+began questioning her about herself and her little companions&mdash;who were
+they, what were they, and how did they come to be here?</p>
+
+<p>"Why, don't you know?" the little one asked, looking at me in amazement. "We're waifs!"</p>
+
+<p>"Waifs! What sort of waifs?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, just waifs."</p>
+
+<p>"But I didn't know this was an orphan-asylum," I said, looking about at
+the children sitting in rows of two and three upon the scattered settees.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, ma'am. We're not orfants," the child hastened to correct me;
+"we're just waifs."</p>
+
+<p>"And where are your fathers and mothers, then?" I cried.</p>
+
+<p>"We ain't got none," Julia replied promptly, the little hand again
+stealing through the long sleeve and stroking my much-admired skirt. She
+had now snuggled down beside me upon the settee, and instinctively,
+rather than from any desire to show friendliness, I drew my arm about
+the small shoulders, which overture was interpreted as an invitation for
+the cropped head to nestle closer.</p>
+
+<p>"But if you haven't father or mothers, then you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> must be orphans," I
+reasoned,&mdash;an argument which made Julia straighten up suddenly and look
+at me in puzzled wonderment.</p>
+
+<p>"No, we ain't orfants, neither, exceptin' just a few that did onct have
+fathers and mothers, mebbe; but me and May Wistaria and Mintie
+Delancy&mdash;they was the girls you seen up-stairs in <span class="smaller">HER</span> room&mdash;we never did
+have no fathers and mothers, we're just waifs, and so's them kids waifs
+too that's playing in the rocking-chair. They was all foundling-asylum kids."</p>
+
+<p>At this moment a thick-set woman in a black dress appeared in the
+doorway, which was a signal for all the little girls to make an
+onslaught upon her. They twined their arms about her large waist, they
+hung three and four upon each of her generous, kindly arms, and the
+smaller girls held on to her skirts.</p>
+
+<p>Thus encumbered, the good Mrs. Lumley introduced herself in an asthmatic
+voice which was scarcely more than a whisper, and in a manner as kindly
+as it was humble. Then she shoved the children back to their benches,
+and led me up-stairs to the dormitory; showing me the cot where I was to
+sleep, the lavatory where I would make my toilet in the mornings, and
+the bath-room where I had the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> privilege of taking a bath once a week.
+She also told me the rules of the house: first bell at six o'clock, when
+everybody in the dormitory must rise and dress; second bell at half-past
+six, when everybody must leave the dormitory, not to return until
+bedtime. As to that hour, it came at various times: for the waifs it was
+seven o'clock; for the regular lodgers, ten o'clock; and for the
+transients, from seven till twelve o'clock, at which hour the house was
+closed for the night.</p>
+
+<p>All this Mrs. Lumley repeated in a dreary monotone which seemed
+strangely out of keeping with the half-concealed kindliness which was
+revealed in her homely countenance. She was a working matron, a sort of
+upper servant, and had been three years in the place, which, I gradually
+gleaned from her, had been started as a home for destitute children and
+had eventually assumed the character and discharged the functions of a
+girls' lodging-house. Under what auspices the house was conducted she
+didn't know any more than did I, any more than I know to this day. There
+was a board of managers,&mdash;ladies who sometimes came to look at the
+dormitories and the bath-rooms and then went away again in their
+carriages; there was the matron, Mrs. Pitbladder, who had been there
+four or five years, she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> thought, but wasn't certain; there were several
+under-matrons, who acted as teachers to the children. What did the
+children study? Reading and writing and arithmetic and the Bible; and
+then, as soon as they were old enough, they were turned into the
+sewing-room, where they were taught dressmaking, or into the laundry,
+where they learned to do fine laundry-work.</p>
+
+<p>All this sounded just and good, and I began to alter my opinion of the
+place. I even began to think that perhaps Mrs. Pitbladder was merely
+absent-minded and a little crotchety; that she had not meant to forget
+my fifteen cents change. I did not know until several days later that
+the house did a large dressmaking and laundry business, and that their
+advertisement appeared, and does to this day appear, in all the daily
+newspapers. It was from the older girls in the dormitory, in whispered
+talks we had at night after we were in bed, that I learned this and
+innumerable other things, which my own observation during the weeks that
+followed served to confirm.</p>
+
+<p>To this home for working girls the waifs, the foundlings, came at all
+sorts of tender years, came from God only knows where&mdash;I could never
+find out exactly&mdash;some of them, perhaps, from city asylums,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> some from
+the families upon which they had been left as an encumbrance. They came
+as little children, and they went away as grown women. For them the home
+was practically a prison. Locked in here from morning till night, week
+in, week out, year after year, they were prisoners at all save certain
+stated times when they were taken abroad for a walk under charge of the
+matrons. In return for a scant education in the rudimentary branches,
+and a very generous tuition in the drudgery of the kitchen, the laundry,
+and the sewing-room, they received in all these years only their board
+and clothes and a certain nominal protection against the vices and
+corruptions of the street and the gutter from which they had been snatched.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"You won't eat here?" Mrs. Lumley inquired as we were going down-stairs
+again. To which I replied with a "Yes, why not? I have arranged with
+Mrs. Pitbladder to do so."</p>
+
+<p>We were on the landing where the stairs turned into the ground-floor.
+She glanced apprehensively at Mrs. Pitbladder's door, into which a small
+blue-aproned figure at this moment was passing with a tray laden with
+Mrs. Pitbladder's breakfast. When it had closed again, she looked at me
+hesitatingly, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> if fearful of taking me too far into her confidence.
+Then, perhaps reading a certain unconscious reassurance there, she
+replied with a brief&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't, if I was you. You can't stand it."</p>
+
+<p>"But I'll have to stand it," I returned; "I'm as poor as anybody here."</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. "But you couldn't work on it&mdash;you're not used to it.
+I can see that. Besides, it isn't so cheap as you think it'll be. You'd
+better go out. I wouldn't even eat here to-day. I wouldn't begin it.
+There's a little lunch-room over on Third Avenue where you can get
+enough to eat, and just as cheap as here."</p>
+
+<p>The woman's manner was so mysterious, and withal so very earnest, not to
+say urgent, that I felt instinctively that there was something more in
+all she said than the mere depreciation of the quality of the victuals
+she warned me against. So I was not surprised when she said slowly and
+insinuatingly, as though feeling every step of the way:</p>
+
+<p>"You know the misunderstanding you had this morning&mdash;about the change?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I answered, more mystified than ever. Then, as she looked me full
+in the eyes, light dawned upon me, and I saw the old woman up-stairs in
+a character as startling as it was infamous.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p><p>"Well," Mrs. Lumley said, when she saw that I understood; and with that
+she again dropped into her habitual expression of bovine stolidness. We
+parted at the foot of the stairs, she to disappear into the back of the
+house, and I to join the waifs in the unfriendly sitting-room.</p>
+
+<p>The afternoon I spent sitting in Union Square, whence I went at
+half-past five for a bite of supper in the dairy lunch-room where I had
+made my toilet in the morning. I had had no luncheon, feeling that I
+could not afford more than two meals a day now. I sat a long time over
+my cup of coffee and three hard rolls. I did not want to return to that
+dreary house until the lamps should be lighted and it was time to go to
+bed. The very thought of returning to sit with those forlorn waifs, in
+that cheerless whitewashed sitting-room, was appalling.</p>
+
+<p>I returned a few minutes before seven, just in time to hear the children
+singing the last stanza of "Beulah Land" as I passed up-stairs to the
+dormitory on the third floor. An old woman sat outside the door,
+crocheting a shawl in such light as she could get from a blue-shaded
+night-lamp that hung in the middle of the great whitewashed room within.
+She looked up from her work long enough to challenge me with a shrewd,
+impertinent look of inquiry,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> demanded to know if I had any lead-pencils
+about my person, and, receiving a polite negative, allowed me to pass.</p>
+
+<p>I was not the first arrival. In the dim light I could make out, here and
+there, a bulging surface in the row of gray-blanketed cots, while in the
+quiet I could hear the deep breathing of the sleepers. For they all
+seemed to be asleep, save one who tossed from one side to the other and
+sighed wearily. The latter was not far away from my own cot, and before
+I had finished undressing she was sitting up looking at me.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd give anything for a drink of water," she said softly.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, is there no water?" I whispered.</p>
+
+<p>The words were not out of my mouth before there was a thumping upon the
+floor outside, and the voice of the beldame spoke sharply:</p>
+
+<p>"No talking, girls!"</p>
+
+<p>The thirsty girl dropped back to her pillow, and I crept under the
+blanket. Later on I learned that each must have her drink of water
+before entering the dormitory, because, once there, it was an iron-clad
+rule that we should not leave until after the rising-bell had rung at
+six the next morning. I also learned, later on, that had there not been
+also an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> iron-clad rule against carrying lead-pencils into the
+dormitory, the snowy-white walls were like as not to be scrawled with
+obscenities during the night hours.</p>
+
+<p>All sorts of girls seeking a night's refuge drifted into this
+working-girls' home. Most of them were "ne'er-do-weels"; some of them
+were girls of lax morality, though very few were essentially "bad."
+When, however, they did happen to be "bad," they were very bad indeed.
+And these lead-pencil inscriptions they left behind them were the
+frightful testimony of their innate depravity.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately for me, I was quite ignorant on this first night of what the
+character of the girls under the gray blankets might in all possibility
+have been, and I settled myself to go to sleep with the thought that a
+working-girls' home was not half bad, after all.</p>
+
+<p>A little while later there was a fresh burst of childish voices and the
+clatter of shoes on the stairs. It was the orphans marching up to bed
+singing "Happy Day!" The music stopped when they reached the dormitory
+door, which they entered silently, two by two. Their undressing was but
+the matter of a few moments, so methodical and precise was every
+movement. The small aprons and petticoats were folded across the foot of
+each cot, and,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> on top, the long black stockings laid neatly. Each pair
+of copper-toed shoes was placed in exactly the same spot under the foot
+of each cot, and each little body, after wriggling itself into a gray
+flannellet nightgown, dropped to its knees and bowed its head upon the
+blanket in silent prayer.</p>
+
+<p>After they had tucked themselves in bed a voice very near me, and which
+I recognized as Julia's, whispered:</p>
+
+<p>"May, are yez asleep?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," muttered May.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, is to-morrow bean day or molasses day?"</p>
+
+<p>"Bean," replied May; and then all was silent in the dormitory, and so
+remained save for the interruption caused by the tiptoe entrance of some
+newly arrived "transient," some homeless wanderer driven here to seek a night refuge.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning we washed and combed in a large common toilet-room. There
+were only a dozen face-bowls, and these we had to watch our chance to
+pounce upon. I waited until the rush was over, and after the orphans had
+scurried down to their breakfast I performed a more leisurely toilet.
+Two other girls were there, doing the same thing. I recognized them as
+transient lodgers, like myself, wanderers that had drifted in.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p><p>Both were very young, and one, whom I had heard sigh, and who groaned
+continuously in her sleep, very, very pretty. The latter entered into
+conversation as we combed before the long, narrow glass. "Do you stay
+here all the time?" I asked. No, she had been living with her
+"lady-friend"; and that lady-friend having departed to the country for
+lack of employment until times would pick up, she was looking about for
+a boarding-house. The subject of work gave me my opportunity, and I
+asked her if she knew of a job. She shook her head. She was a
+skirt-hand; she had worked in a Broadway sweat-shop, and didn't know
+anything about any other sort of work. As we talked she finished her
+toilet, putting on as the finishing touch a great picture-hat and a
+scanty black Eton. Ready for the street, you would have little dreamed
+that she had slept in a ten-cent lodging-house. After going through a
+sort of inspection by the old woman at the entrance, during which it was
+ascertained we had not pilfered anything, we were allowed to depart.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>XII</h2>
+
+<h3>IN WHICH I SPEND A HAPPY FOUR WEEKS MAKING ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS</h3>
+
+<p>Bright and early, after a four-cent breakfast, I was on my way to find
+the place where I had read the sign, "Flower-makers Wanted.&mdash;Paid while
+learning."</p>
+
+<p>It was not difficult to find, even had I not had the number so securely
+tucked away in my memory.</p>
+
+<p>"Flowers &amp; Feathers," in giant gilded letters, I read a block away, as I
+dodged electric cars and motor vehicles, and threaded the maze of
+delivery wagons and vans. I had a hasty interview with the
+superintendent, a large and effusively polite man, whose plump white
+hands sparkled with gems. He put me on the freight-elevator and told the
+boy to show me to Miss Higgins. At the third floor the iron doors were
+thrown open, and I stepped into what seemed to be a great, luxuriant
+garden. The room was long and wide, and golden with April <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>sunshine, and
+in the April breeze that blew through the half-open windows a million
+flowers fluttered and danced in the ecstacy of spring. Flowers, flowers,
+flowers everywhere; piled high on the tables, tossed in mad confusion on
+the floor, and strung in long garlands to the far end of the big room.</p>
+
+<p>"The lady with the black hair, sitting down there by them American
+Beauties," said the elevator-boy, waving his hand toward the rear.</p>
+
+<p>I passed down a narrow path between two rows of tables that looked like
+blossoming hedges. Through the green of branches and leaves flashed the
+white of shirt-waists, and among the scarlet and purple and yellow and
+blue of myriad flowers bobbed the smiling faces of girls as they looked
+up from their task long enough to inspect the passing stranger. Here
+were no harsh sounds, no rasping voices, no shrill laughter, no pounding
+of engines. Everything just as one would expect to find it in a
+flower-garden&mdash;soft voices humming like bees, and gentle merriment that
+flowed musically as a brook over stones.</p>
+
+<p>"The lady with the black hair" sat before a cleared space on a table
+banked on either side with big red roses. In front of her were three or
+four glasses, each containing one salmon-colored rose, fresh and
+fragrant from the hothouse.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p><p>Leaning forward, with her elbows on the table and her chin in her palm,
+she was staring intently at these four splendid blooms. Then she picked
+up a half-finished muslin rose and compared them. All this I saw while I
+waited timidly for her to look up. But she did not see me. She was
+absorbed in the study of the living rose. At last I summoned courage to
+inquire if she was Miss Higgins. She started, looked up quickly, and
+nodded her head, with a smile that displayed a row of pretty teeth. Her
+manner was cordial.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you ever worked at flowers before?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Ever worked at feathers?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the best I can do is to put you at blossom-making to-day, and see
+how you take to it. It's too bad, though, you don't know anything about
+feathers; for the flower season ends in a month, anyway, and then I have
+to lay off all my girls till September, unless they can make feathers
+too. Then they get jobs on the next floor. There'll be lots of work
+here, though, for a month, and we might take you back in September."</p>
+
+<p>The tone was so kindly, the interest so genuine,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> that I was prompted to
+explain my situation, assuring her I should be glad to get work even for
+four weeks. As a result, I was put on Rosenfeld's pay-roll for three and
+a half dollars per week, with half a day's extra pay for night work: the
+latter had been a necessity three or four nights every week for six
+months, and was likely to continue for two, maybe three, weeks longer.
+Besides the assurance of extra pay from this source, Miss Higgins also
+intimated, as she conducted me to one of the tables, that if I was "able
+to make good" she would raise me to four dollars at the end of the week.</p>
+
+<p>Soon I was "slipping up" poppies under the instruction of Bessie, a
+dreamy-eyed young Jewess. The process was simple enough, to watch the
+skilled fingers of the other girls, but it was very tedious to my
+untried hand. In awkward, self-conscious fashion I began to open out the
+crimped wads of scarlet muslin which came to us hot from the crimping-machine.</p>
+
+<p>"You mustn't smooth the creases out too much," Bessie protested; and
+with a deft touch, the right pull here, the proper flattening there, the
+muslin scrap blossomed into a fluttering corolla.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't get discouraged. We've all got to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> learn," one of the girls at
+the far end of the table called out cheerily.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and don't be afraid of making a mistake," put in my vis-&agrave;-vis, a
+pretty Italian. "We all make mistakes while we're learning; but you'll
+find this a nice place to work, and Miss Higgins is so lovely&mdash;she's
+awful nice, too, to the new girls."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, indeed," added Bessie. "It isn't many years since she worked at
+the table herself. I've often heard her tell about the first day she
+went to work down at Golderberg's."</p>
+
+<p>"That's the worst in town," piped another; "I stayed there just two
+days. That was enough for me. Whenever the girls disagree down there,
+they step out into the hall and lick each other. First day I was there,
+one girl got two ribs broken. Her rival just walked all over her."</p>
+
+<p>"What did they do with the girls?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, nothing. They made it all up, and were as sweet as two
+turtle-doves, walking around the workroom with their arms around each other."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that's what it is to work in those cheap shops," commented Annie
+Welshons, of the big blue eyes and yellow hair. "If they ever do get
+respectable girls, they won't stay long."</p>
+
+<p>As we worked the conversation ran easily. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> talk was in good,
+up-to-date English. There was rarely a mispronounced word, or a slip in
+grammar; and there was just enough well-selected slang to make the
+dialogue bright and to stamp the chatterers as conversant with the live
+questions of the day. The topics at all times bespoke clean minds and an
+intelligent point of view.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you American born?" Bessie inquired by and by.</p>
+
+<p>The question sounded unusual, almost unnecessary, until I discovered
+that out of the eight girls in our immediate circle, only half were
+native Americans. My vis-&agrave;-vis, Therese, was a Neapolitan; Mamie, a
+Genoese; Amelia was born in Bohemia; the girl with the yellow hair was
+North German; and Nellie declared she was from County Killarney and
+mighty glad of it.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I'm an American," said Bessie, tossing her head in mock scorn, as
+she cleared away a quantity of the flowers that had been meanwhile
+accumulating on the wire lines.</p>
+
+<p>Therese laughed. "But only by the skin of your teeth&mdash;an eleventh-hour
+arrival." Then she turned to me and whispered that Bessie was born only
+two weeks after her mother came to this country.</p>
+
+<p>"Better late than never," laughed Bessie, casting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> a backward and
+withering glance at the aliens as she moved away with her trayful of
+scarlet blossoms to the branchers' table, where another relay of workers
+twisted green leaves among the scarlet and tied them in wreaths and bunches.</p>
+
+<p>By eleven o'clock I had made two dozen poppies, which Amelia told me was
+"just grand for a beginner." I began to feel confident that I should
+hold the job, and my fingers flew. Into the glue-pot at my right hand I
+dipped my little finger, picking up at the same moment with my other
+hand a bit of paper-covered wire. On the end of the wire was a bunch of
+short yellow threads, which were touched lightly with my glue-smeared
+finger, the wire being held between the thumb and forefinger. With the
+free left hand, I caught up a fluttering corolla, touching its
+perforated center with glue; then I "slipped up" the wire about an inch,
+took up another corolla in the same way, and then drew the two to the
+"pipped" or heart end of the wire, where they now became a big red
+flower with a golden eye. A bit of dark-green rubber tubing drawn over
+the wire completed the process, the end was bent into a hook, and the
+full-blown poppy hung on the line.</p>
+
+<p>At a quarter past eleven a little girl wearing an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> immense flower-hat
+and carrying a large market-basket came and asked us for our lunch
+orders. She carried a long piece of pasteboard and wrote as the girls
+dictated. One could buy anything one wanted, Bessie explained; bread and
+butter, eggs, chops, steak, potatoes, canned goods, for which there was
+ample provision for cooking on the gas-stoves used by the rose-makers to
+heat their pincers. When the little girl was gone I learned that she was
+one of the errand-runners, and that this was her daily task.</p>
+
+<p>"How far does she go to market?"</p>
+
+<p>"Over to First Avenue."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't that pretty far for a small girl to carry such a heavy load?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she doesn't mind it. All the errand-girls are tickled to death to
+get the job. The grocers pay them ten per cent. commission on all they buy."</p>
+
+<p>It lacked but a few minutes of twelve when the child returned, panting
+under her burden.</p>
+
+<p>"How much did you clear to-day?" somebody asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Twenty-one cents," the child answered, blushing as red as the poppies.</p>
+
+<p>When Miss Higgins slipped her tall, light figure into her stylish jacket
+and began to pin on her hat it was always a sign that the lunch-hour had
+come.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> One hundred and twenty girls popped up from their hiding-places
+behind the hedges, which had grown to great height since morning. In a
+trice spaces were cleared on the tables. Cups and saucers and knives and
+forks appeared as if by magic. In that portion of the room where the
+crimping-machines stood preparations for cooking commenced. The pincers
+and tongs of the rose-makers, and the pressing-molds of the
+leaf-workers, were taken off the fires, and in their place appeared
+stew-pans and spiders, and pots and kettles. Bacon and chops sputtered,
+steak sizzled; potatoes, beans, and corn stewed merrily. What had been
+but lately a flower-garden, by magic had become a mammoth kitchen filled
+with appetizing sounds and delicious odors. White-aproned cooks scurried
+madly. It was like a school-girls' picnic. As they moved about I noticed
+how well dressed and neat were my shop-mates in their white shirt-waists
+and dark skirts. Indeed, in the country village I had come from any one
+of them would have appeared as the very embodiment of fashion.</p>
+
+<p>Cooked and served at last, we ate our luncheon at leisure, and with the
+luxury of snowy-white table-cloths and napkins of tissue-paper, which
+needs of the workroom were supplied in prodigal quantities.</p>
+
+<p>During this hour I heard a great deal about the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> girls and their work.
+They told me, as they told all new-comers, of the wonderful rise of Miss
+Higgins, who began as a table-worker at three and a half dollars a week,
+and was now making fifty dollars. They told me of her rise from the best
+rose-maker in New York to designer and forewoman. They dwelt on her
+kindness to everybody, discussed her pretty clothes, and wondered which
+of her beaux she was going to marry.</p>
+
+<p>All afternoon I "slipped up" poppies. At five Miss Higgins came to tell
+me I was "doing fine," and that I should have four dollars instead of
+three and a half. This made the work easier than ever, and my fingers
+flew happily till six o'clock. Then we cooked dinner as we did our
+luncheon, but we took only half an hour for our evening meal, so as to
+get off at half-past nine instead of ten. At night the work was harder,
+as the room became terribly hot from the gas-jets and from the stoves
+where the rose-makers heated their tools. The faces grew tired and pale,
+and the girls sang to keep themselves awake. "The Rabbi's Daughter,"
+"The City of Sighs and Tears," and "The Banquet in Misery Hall" were the
+favorite songs. A rising breeze swept up Broadway, now almost deserted,
+and rushed through the windows, setting all our <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>blossoms fluttering.
+Outside a soft, warm spring rain began to fall on the tired, sleepy city.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>One week, two weeks, passed in these pleasant surroundings. I was still
+"slipping up" poppies all day long, and every evening till half-past
+nine. Then I went home to the little cot in the dormitory of the "home."
+It would seem that all the world's wife and daughters were to wear
+nothing but poppies that season. But ours was only a small portion of
+Rosenfeld's output. Violets, geraniums, forget-me-nots,
+lilies-of-the-valley, apple-blossoms, daisies, and roses of a score of
+varieties were coming to life in this big garden in greater multitudes
+even than our common poppies. Forty girls worked on roses alone. The
+rose-makers are the swells of the trade. They are the best paid, the
+most independent, and always in competitive demand during the flower
+season. Any one can learn with patience how to make other kinds of
+flowers; but the rose-maker is born, and the thoroughly experienced
+rose-maker is an artist. Her work has a distinction, a touch, a "feel,"
+as she calls it, which none but the artist can give.</p>
+
+<p>The star rose-maker of the shop, next to the forewoman (who was reputed
+the finest in America),<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> was about twenty-five. Her hair was fluffy and
+brown, and her eyes big and dark blue. She was of Irish birth, and had
+been in America about fourteen years. One day I stopped at her chair and
+asked how long it took her to learn.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm still learning," she replied, without looking up from the tea-rose
+in her fingers. "It was seven years before I considered myself
+first-class; and though I'm at it now thirteen, I don't consider I know
+it all yet." She worked rapidly, flecking the delicate salmon-colored
+petals with her glue-finger, and pasting them daintily around the
+fast-growing rose. I watched her pinch and press and crease each frail
+petal with her hot iron instruments, and when she had put on a thick
+rubber stem and hung the finished flower on the line she looked up and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Want to see a rose-maker's hand?" she remarked, turning her palm up for
+my inspection. She laughed aloud at my exclamation of horror. Calloused
+and hard as a piece of tortoise-shell, ridged with innumerable
+corrugations, and hopelessly discolored, with the thumb and forefinger
+flattened like miniature spades, her right hand had long ago lost nearly
+all semblance to the other.</p>
+
+<p>"It is the hot irons do that," she said, drawing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> her pincers from the
+fire and twirling them in the air until they grew cool enough to proceed
+with the work. "We use them every minute. We crease the petals with
+them, and crinkle and vein and curl the outer edges. And we always have
+to keep them just hot enough not to scorch the thin muslin."</p>
+
+<p>"How many can you make a day?"</p>
+
+<p>"That depends on the rose. This sort&mdash;" picking up a small, cheap June
+rose&mdash;"this sort a fair worker can make a gross of a day. But I have
+made roses where five single flowers were considered a fine day's job.
+Each of those roses had one hundred and seventy-five pieces, however;
+and there were eighteen different shapes and sizes of petals; and
+besides that, every one of those pieces had to be put in its own place.
+If one piece had been wrongly applied, the whole rose would have been
+spoiled. But they don't make many of such complicated roses in this
+country. They have to import them. They haven't enough skilled workers
+to fill big orders, and it doesn't pay the manufacturers to bother with small orders."</p>
+
+<p>The girl did all the fine work of the place, and had always more waiting
+to be done than she could have accomplished with four hands instead of
+two. She had no rival to whom this surplus work could be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> turned over.
+The dull season had no terrors for her, nor would it have had for her
+comrades had they been equally skilled. She made from twenty-two to
+twenty-five dollars a week, all the year round, and was too busy ever to
+take a vacation. The other girls averaged nine dollars, and if they got
+eight months' work a year they considered themselves fortunate. They
+were clever and industrious, but they had not learned to make the finer grade of roses.</p>
+
+<p>The third week came and went all too quickly, and we were now entering
+on the fourth. Plainly the season was drawing to its close. The orders
+that had come pouring in from milliners and modistes all over the land
+for six months were now dwindling daily. The superintendent and the
+"boss" walked through the department every day, and we heard them talk
+about overproduction. Friday the atmosphere was tense with anxiety. The
+girls' faces were grave. Almost without exception, there were people at
+home upon whom this annual "lay-off" fell with tragic force. I have not
+talked with one of them who did not have to work, and they have always
+some one at home to care for. A few were widows with small children at
+home or in the day nursery. One can tell little, by their appearance,
+about these secret burdens. Each girl wears a mask.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> The neat costume,
+made with her own hands in midnight hours snatched from hard-earned
+rest, is no evidence of extravagance, or even of comfortable
+circumstances. It is only that manifestation of proper pride and
+self-respect which the best type of wage-earning woman is never without.
+If they sometimes talk happily about theaters and parties and beaux, if
+occasionally there is a brief spell of innocent hilarity in the
+workroom, it is only the inevitable and legitimate outcropping of
+healthy and wholesome animal spirits, of a vigorous hope which not even
+the hard conditions of life can crush.</p>
+
+<p>On Saturday morning many of the girls sat idle. "Don't work too fast, or
+you'll work yourself out of a job," one cried in jest; but the meaning
+was one of dead earnest. And as the day passed the prophecy came true to
+one after another. In the afternoon we made a feint of work by papering
+wires and opening petals for those who were still busy. The hours passed
+drearily. Miss Higgins was going over her pay-roll, checking off the
+names of the girls who could make feathers as well as flowers. All
+others were to be laid off indefinitely that night. We watched anxiously
+for the moment, which was not far off.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope Miss Higgins won't cry&mdash;she did last<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> year. It breaks her up
+terribly to let us off," somebody remarked.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a long time to be idle&mdash;till September," I suggested to the girl
+across the work-table. She looked up in surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"Idle!" she exclaimed. "But we are never idle. We daren't. We get other jobs."</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, everything: waitress in a summer boarding-house, novelty goods,
+binderies, shirt-waists, stores, anything we can get."</p>
+
+<p>"She's coming," some one whispered. Everybody tried to look unconcerned.
+Those who had no work to claim attention looked carefully at their
+finger-nails, or found sudden necessity to adjust collars and belts.
+Miss Higgins passed along the tables, bending over the heads and
+speaking to each in a low voice. The tears were running down her cheeks.
+Those retained concealed their happiness as best they could, and spoke
+words of sympathy and encouragement to their less fortunate companions.
+The warrants were received with a stoicism that was more pathetic than
+tears. From the far end of the room I heard an unaccustomed sound, and
+turning, I saw the forewoman, who had dropped into a chair at the
+forget-me-not table, her face<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> buried in her arms, and sobbing like a
+child. It was the signal that her cruel duty was done, that the last
+"lay-off" sentence had been pronounced, that the work for the day and
+for the "season" was over, that it had come time to say good-by.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-by!" The voices echoed as we trooped down-stairs to the street
+door. "Good-by! Good-by!" The lingering farewells rose faintly above the
+noises of Broadway, as we scattered at the corner. Good-by to
+Rosenfeld's&mdash;now no longer a reality, but rather a memory of idyllic
+beauty&mdash;the workroom bright with sunshine and flashing with color, with
+the faces of the workers bent over the fashioning of rose and poppy, and
+best of all, the kind hearts and the quick sympathy that blossomed there
+as luxuriantly as the flowers themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Good-by to my four happiest weeks in the workaday world.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THREE "LADY-FRIENDS," AND THE ADVENTURES THAT BEFALL THEM</h3>
+
+<p>Into every human experience there must come sooner or later the bitter
+consciousness that Nature is remorselessly cruel; that she laughs
+loudest when we are most miserable; that she is never so bright, never
+so beautiful as in the darkest hour of our need; that she ever makes
+mock of our agony and ever smiles serenely at our despair.</p>
+
+<p>Such, at least, were my feelings in those long, beautiful June days that
+followed close on the "lay-off" at Rosenfeld's.</p>
+
+<p>Dear little Bessie! poor unhappy Eunice! This chapter of my experiences
+is so dominated by their personalities that I shall devote a few words
+to recounting the circumstances which brought us together and sent us
+faring forth on a summer's day to seek new fortunes, three
+"lady-friends," arm in arm. I make no apology for saying
+"lady-friends."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> I know all the prejudices of polite society, which
+smiles at what is esteemed to be a piece of vulgar vanity characteristic
+of the working-girl world. And yet I use the term here in all
+seriousness, in all good faith; not critically, not playfully, but
+tenderly. Because in the humble world in which our comradeship was
+formed there is none other to designate the highest type of friendship,
+no other phrase to define that affection between girl and girl which is
+as the love of sisters. In the great workaday world where we toiled and
+hoped and prayed and suffered together for a brief period we were called
+"the three lady-friends" by our shop-mates, and such we were to each
+other always, and such we shall be throughout the chapter; and I know,
+if Bessie and Eunice were here to-night, looking over my shoulder as I
+write the account of that sordid little tragedy and the part they played
+in it,&mdash;I know they would clasp their rough little hands in mine and nod approval.</p>
+
+<p>Bessie had been my "learner" at Rosenfeld's. I still remember her
+exactly as I saw her that first time, a slender little figure bending
+over the work-table. Her shirt-waist was snowy-white, and fastened
+down&mdash;oh, so securely!&mdash;under the narrow leather belt; she had a wealth
+of straight blonde<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> hair of that clear, transparent quality which, when
+heaped high on her head, looked like a mass of spun glass; her cheeks,
+which were naturally very pale, burned a deep crimson as they reflected
+the light on the poppies beneath; and after a while, when she raised her
+head, I saw that her eyes were blue, and that her profile, sharp and
+clear cut, was that of a young Jewess. I had thought her to be about
+twenty-two,&mdash;for, pretty and fresh as she was, she looked every day of
+it,&mdash;but I found out later that she was not then eighteen.</p>
+
+<p>We had not been long getting acquainted&mdash;that is, as well acquainted as
+was possible in a busy shop like Rosenfeld's. Indeed, it would be a
+strange, sad world&mdash;stranger and sadder than it really is&mdash;if Bessie and
+I had not sooner or later established a certain bond of intimacy.
+Sitting opposite at the same work-table, we made poppies together and
+exchanged our little stories. She had been working, since she was
+fifteen, at all sorts of odd jobs: cash-girl in a department store;
+running errands for a fashionable modiste; cashier in a dairy
+lunch-room; making picture-frames. This was her second season at
+flower-making, and she liked it better than anything she had ever tried,
+if only there was work all the year round; for she couldn't afford to
+sit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> idle through the long summer months&mdash;well, I should say not!&mdash;with
+eight small brothers and sisters at home, and a rather incompetent
+father, and sixteen dollars a month rent! The experiences of a score of
+shops, and the motley crew of people she had worked with in these busy
+years, Bessie in her careless, simple narrative had the power to invest
+with lifelike reality.</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely less interesting than all this to me was my own story to
+Bessie, which found ready sympathy in her tender heart, especially that
+part of it that had to do with the home for working girls where I was
+now living. For to Bessie, with her inborn racial love of family,
+nothing was so much to be pitied as the unfortunates who found shelter
+there. She seemed to take a certain sort of consolation for her own hard
+life in hearing the sordid details of the wretched waifs and strays that
+came wandering into the "home" at all hours of the day and night. I told
+her about the dormitory where we slept side by side in gray-blanketed
+cots, each girl's clothes folded neatly across the footboard; of the
+cross old dragon who sat outside in the brightly lighted passageway, and
+snored all night long, when she should have been attending to her
+duties,&mdash;which duties were to keep an eye on us lest we rob one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> another
+of the few pennies we might have under our pillows, or that we might not
+scrawl obscene verses on the whitewashed walls, in case we had succeeded
+in smuggling in a forbidden lead-pencil. For such offenses, and they
+happened only too often, we were all held equally guilty in the eyes of
+the sour, autocratic matron. As each night brought a fresh relay of
+girls to the dormitory, it was productive of a new series of episodes,
+which I related faithfully to Bessie.</p>
+
+<p>That is how she became interested in Eunice. The latter had come
+tiptoeing into the dormitory one night long after the other girls were
+fast asleep, and without undressing threw herself on the vacant cot next
+to mine. In the lamplight that shone from the passageway full on her
+face, I saw, as I peeped above the rough blanket, that the new-comer was
+no common type of waif and stray. There was an elusive charm in the
+glimpse of profile and in the delicate aquiline features, a certain
+suggestion of beauty, were it not for the white, drawn look that
+enveloped them like a death-mask. As I was gazing furtively at her she
+turned on her side, moaning as only a girl can moan when peace of mind
+is gone forever. Such sounds were not uncommon in the dormitory. Several
+times, waking in the night, I had listened<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> pityingly to the same
+half-smothered lament. On this night I had fallen asleep as usual, when
+suddenly a shriek rang out, and I wakened to hear the angry accents of
+the beldam protesting against "hysterics," and the indistinct muttering
+of the girlish sleepers whose rest the stranger had so inconsiderately
+disturbed. In a few moments everything was quiet again, our old woman
+had renewed her snoring, and then the new-comer, repressing her anguish
+as best she could, slid kneeling to the floor.</p>
+
+<p>It was then, all sleep gone for that night, I reached out my hand and
+touched the sleeve of her black dress.</p>
+
+<p>From that moment we became friends. The information which she vouchsafed
+about herself was meager and not of a character to throw much light upon
+her former condition and environment. It was obvious that there had been
+a tragedy in her life, and I instinctively guessed what that tragedy
+was, although I respected the reserve she threw around her and asked no
+indiscreet questions. She was fairly well educated, had been brought up
+in a small New Jersey village, and had been a stenographer until she
+went to a telephone office to tend a switchboard. Between that job and
+her advent in the "home" was an obvious hiatus, which at times she
+vaguely <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>referred to as a period wherein she "lost her grip on
+everything." She had no money, and her clothes were even shabbier than
+my own, and she was too discouraged even to look for work. Her cot and
+three meager meals a day, consisting of bread and tea for breakfast and
+supper, and bread and coffee and soup for dinner, she received, as did
+all the transient boarders, in return for a ten-hour-day's work in the
+"home" kitchen. After a few nights she ceased moaning, and settled
+gradually into a hopeless apathy, while over her deep gray eyes there
+grew a film of silent misery.</p>
+
+<p>Stirred by my fragmentary accounts of Eunice's wretchedness, the
+generous-hearted Bessie one day suggested that we take her with us to
+look for a job as soon as the anticipated "lay-off" notice came into
+effect at Rosenfeld's. And so, on the Monday morning following that
+dreaded event, Bessie met Eunice and me at the lower right-hand corner
+of Broadway and Grand Street, and together we applied for work at the
+R&mdash;&mdash; Underwear Company, which had advertised that morning for twenty operators.</p>
+
+<p>"Ever run a power Singer?" queried the foreman.</p>
+
+<p>"No, but we can learn. We're all quick," <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>answered Bessie, who had
+volunteered to act as spokesman.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I guess you can learn all right, but you won't make very much at
+first. All come together?... So! Well, then, I guess you'll want to work
+in the same room," and with that he ushered us into a very inferno of
+sound, a great, yawning chaos of terrific noise. The girls, who sat in
+long rows up and down the length of the great room, did not raise their
+eyes to the new-comers, as is the rule in less strenuous workrooms.
+Every pair of eyes seemed to be held in fascination upon the flying and
+endless strip of white that raced through a pair of hands to feed itself
+into the insatiable maw of the electric sewing-machine. Every face,
+tense and stony, bespoke a superb effort to concentrate mind and body,
+and soul itself, literally upon the point of a needle. Every form was
+crouched in the effort to guide the seam through the presser-foot. And
+piled between the opposing phalanxes of set faces were billows upon
+billows of foamy white muslin and lace&mdash;the finished garments wrought by
+the so-many dozen per hour, for the so-many cents per day,&mdash;and wrought,
+too, in this terrific, nerve-racking noise.</p>
+
+<p>The foreman led us into the middle of the room, which was lighted by
+gas-jets that hung directly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> over the girls' heads, although the ends of
+the shop had bright sunshine from the windows. He seemed a good-natured,
+respectable sort of man, of about forty, and was a Jew. Bessie and me he
+placed at machines side by side, and Eunice a little farther down the
+line. Then my first lesson began. He showed me how to thread bobbin and
+needle, how to operate ruffler and tucker, and also how to turn off and
+on the electric current which operated the machinery. My first attempt
+to do the latter was productive of a shock to the nerves that could not
+have been greater if, instead of pressing the harmless little lever
+under the machine with my knee, I had accidently exploded a bomb. The
+foreman laughed good-naturedly at my fright.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll get used to it by and by," he shouted above the noise; "but like
+as not for a while you won't sleep very good nights&mdash;kind of nervous;
+but you'll get over that in a week or so," and he ducked his head under
+the machine to adjust the belt. Suddenly, above all the frenzied
+crashing of the machines came a sound, half scream, half cackle:</p>
+
+<p>"Yi! yi! my pretty one, you'll get used to it by and by; you'll get used
+to anything in this world." It was an old woman's voice, and looking
+across the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> table, I saw a merry-eyed, toothless old crone, who was
+grinning and nodding at me.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello! hello there, Miriam! what's eating you now?" shouted the
+foreman, emerging and scrambling to his feet as he turned to get Bessie
+started. But the strange old creature only grinned wider and screeched,
+"Yi! yi!" louder than ever.</p>
+
+<p>But I had not time, either, to look at or listen to her now, as I leaned
+over the machine and practised at running a straight seam. Ah, the skill
+of these women and girls, and of the strange creature opposite, who can
+make a living at this torturing labor! How very different, how
+infinitely harder it is, as compared with running an ordinary
+sewing-machine. The goods that my nervous fingers tried to guide ran
+every wrong way. I had no control whatever over the fearful velocity
+with which the needle danced along the seam. In utter discouragement, I
+stopped trying for a moment, and watched the girl at my right. She was a
+swarthy, thick-lipped Jewess, of the type most common in such places,
+but I looked at her with awe and admiration. In Rachel Goldberg's case
+the making of muslin, lace-trimmed corset-covers was an art rather than
+a craft. She was a remarkable operator even among scores of experts at
+the R&mdash;&mdash;. Under her stubby,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> ill-kept hands ruffles and tucks and
+insertion bands and lace frills were wrought with a beauty and softness
+of finish, and a speed and precision of workmanship, that made her the
+wonder and envy of the shop. And with what ease she seemed to do it all,
+despite the riveted eyes and tense-drawn muscles of her expressionless
+face! Suddenly her machine stopped, she looked up with a loud yawn, and
+stretched her arms above her head. She acknowledged the flattery of my
+look with a patronizing smile and a "How-do-you-think-you're-going-to-like-your-job?" I answered the
+conventional question in the usual way, and remarked that she sewed as
+if she had done it for ever and ever, and as if it were no work at all.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head. "Yes, I've worked a long time at it, but my shoulder
+aches as bad this morning as it did when I was a learner like you," and
+she pressed the power-lever and again bent over the tucking.</p>
+
+<p>At my left Bessie was also practising on running seams, and a little
+farther down we saw poor Eunice struggling at the same hopeless lesson.
+The foreman, whose name proved to be Isaacs,&mdash;"Abe" Isaacs,&mdash;brought us
+our first "lot" of work. Mine consisted of six dozen coarse muslin
+corset-covers,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> which were already seamed together, and which I was
+shown how to "finish" with an embroidery yoke and ruffled edging about
+the arm's-eye. There is no basting, no pinning together of pieces; all
+the work is free-hand, and must be done with infinite exactness. I must
+hold the embroidery and the finishing strips of beading on the edge of
+the muslin with an exact nicety that will insure the edges of all three
+being caught in one seam; a process difficult enough on any
+sewing-machine, under any circumstances, but doubly so when the lightest
+touch sends the three-ply fabric under the needle with an incalculable
+velocity. Result of my first hour's work: I had spoiled a dozen
+garments. Try as I would, I invariably lost all control of my materials,
+and the needle plunged right and left&mdash;everywhere, in fact, except along
+the straight and narrow way laid out for it. And, to make matters still
+worse, I was painfully conscious that my old woman vis-&agrave;-vis was
+laughing at my distress with her irritating "Yi, yi!"</p>
+
+<p>As I spoiled each garment I thrust it into the bottom of a green
+pasteboard box under the table, which held my allotment of work, and
+from the top of the box grabbed up a fresh piece. I glanced over my
+shoulder and saw that Bessie was doing the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> thing, although what we
+were going to do with them, or how account for such wholesale
+devastation of goods, we were too perturbed to consider. At last,
+however, after repeated trials, and by guiding the seam with laborious
+care, I succeeded in completing one garment without disaster; and I had
+just started another, when&mdash;crash!&mdash;flying shuttles and spinning bobbins
+and swirling wheels came to a standstill. My sewing-machine was silent,
+as were all the others in the great workroom. Something had happened to the dynamo.</p>
+
+<p>There was a howl of disappointment.</p>
+
+<p>"Yi, yi!" screamed the old woman, throwing up her hands in a gesture of
+unutterable disgust; and then, catching my eye, her wrinkled old lips
+parted in a smile of friendly interest.</p>
+
+<p>"How many did ye bungle?" she chuckled, leaning over and looking
+furtively up and down the room, as if afraid of being caught talking to
+me. I blushed in confusion that was half fright, and she raised a
+forefinger menacingly:</p>
+
+<p>"Yi! yi! ye thought I didn't see ye sneaking the spoiled truck into the
+green box; but old Miriam's got sharp eyes, she has, and she likes to
+watch you young uns when you comes in first. You're not the only one.
+They all spoil lots before they learn to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> make a living out of it.
+There's lots like ye!" and stooping over, she drew a handful of my
+botched work out of the box and began to rip the stitching.</p>
+
+<p>"That's all right; I'm glad to help ye!" she protested. "And sure, if we
+don't help each other, who's a-going to help us poor devils, I'd like to know?"</p>
+
+<p>I, too, busied myself with the task of ripping, which I saw Bessie and
+Eunice were also doing; in fact, all the new-comers of the morning could
+be thus singled out. The practised hands availed themselves of the
+enforced rest by yawning and stretching their arms, and by comparing the
+earnings of the morning; for we all worked on piece-work. Rachel
+Goldberg had finished four dozen of extra-fine garments, which meant
+seventy-five cents, and it was not yet eleven o'clock. She would make at
+least one dollar and sixty cents before the day was over, provided we
+did not have any serious breakdowns. She watched the clock
+impatiently,&mdash;every minute she was idle meant a certain fraction of a
+penny lost,&mdash;and crouched sullenly over her machine for the signal.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you thinking about, Miriam?" a frowsy-headed girl asked,
+giving the wink to the crowd.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span></p><p>The generous-hearted old lady looked up from the task she was helping
+me to do, and raising her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the
+gaslight, peered down the long line of girls until she placed the speaker.</p>
+
+<p>"Yi, yi! Ye want to know what I'm thinking about? Well, mebbe, Beckie
+Frankenstein, I'm thinking what a beautiful world this is, and what a
+fine time you and me has," and the strange creature broke into a laugh
+that was more terrible than a sob.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, there you go again, Miriam! What's eatin' you to-day?" cried the
+foreman, as he came along to inspect the work; and seeing Miriam undoing
+my blunders, asked, "Who did that?"</p>
+
+<p>Before I could put in a half-frightened acknowledgment, my intercessor had spoken up:</p>
+
+<p>"And whose 'u'd them be but mine, Abe Isaacs?"&mdash;scowling at me to keep
+silence when I opened my mouth to contradict her.</p>
+
+<p>The foreman looked incredulous. "You, Miriam! Do you mean to tell me it
+was you spoiled all that work? What's the matter with you to-day,
+anyway? If you don't do better, I'll have to fire you."</p>
+
+<p>There was a good-natured tone, a kindly compassion, in Abe Isaacs's
+voice which was not in accord<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> with the words; and when he turned and
+asked me what I had done, there was no fear in my heart. I answered by
+looking significantly at old Miriam.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought as much," he muttered under his breath, and passed on to Bessie.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor old Miriam, she's teched up here," one of the girls explained,
+tapping her forehead. "They say it was the old sweat-shops put her out
+of her mind, and I guess it's so, all right. My mother knows two ladies
+that was made crazy sewing pants up to Sternberg's. But that was long
+ago, when they used to treat the girls so bad. Things is ever so much
+better now, only Miriam can't get used to the improvements. She's a
+hundred years behind the times."</p>
+
+<p>I was still lost in admiring wonder of Rachel Goldberg's skill. I asked
+her how long it would take me to learn to do it as well. She did not
+have a chance to answer before a harsh laugh was heard and a new voice asserted itself.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh-ho! you'll never learn to work like her, and you'd better find it
+out now. I seen you running your machine, and I says to myself, 'That
+girl 'll never make her salt making underclothes.' Pants 'd be more in
+your line. To make money on muslin you've got to be born to 't."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span></p><p>"That's no lie, either," muttered another.</p>
+
+<p>"You bet it ain't!" declared the expert Rachel. "My mother was working
+on shirts for a straight ten months before I was born."</p>
+
+<p>In half an hour we had resumed work, and at half-past twelve we stopped
+for another half-hour and ate luncheon&mdash;Bessie, Eunice, and I in a
+corner by ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>We held a conference, and compared notes of the morning's progress,
+which had been even more discouraging to poor Eunice than to us; for to
+her it had brought the added misfortune of a row of stitches in her
+right forefinger. We counted up our profits for the morning, and the
+aggregate earnings of the three of us did not amount to ten cents. Of
+course we would learn to do better, but it would take a long, long time,
+Bessie was firmly convinced, before we could even make enough to buy our
+lunches. It was decided that one of us should resign the job that night,
+and the other two keep at it until the delegate found something better
+for us all and had tested the new job to her satisfaction. Bessie was of
+course appointed, and the next morning Eunice and I went alone, with
+plausible excuses for the absent Bessie, for we had a certain delicacy
+about telling the real facts to so kind a foreman as "Abe."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span></p><p>The second day we had no better luck, and the pain between the
+shoulder-blades was unceasing. All night long I had tossed on my narrow
+cot, with aching back and nerves wrought up to such a tension that the
+moment I began to doze off I was wakened by a spasmodic jerk of the
+right arm as it reached forward to grasp a visionary strip of lace. That
+evening, as we filed out at six o'clock, Bessie was waiting for us, her
+gentle face full of radiance and good news. Even the miserable Eunice
+was affected by her hopefulness.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, girls, I've got something that's really good&mdash;three dollars a week
+while you're learning, and an awful nice shop; and just think,
+girls!&mdash;the hours&mdash;I never had anything like it before, and I've knocked
+around at eighteen different jobs&mdash;half-past eight to five, and&mdash;" she
+paused for breath to announce the glorious fact&mdash;"Girls, just think of
+it!&mdash;<i>Saturday afternoons off</i>, all the year round."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>IN WHICH A TRAGIC FATE OVERTAKES MY "LADY-FRIENDS"</h3>
+
+<p>The next morning we met on the corner, as usual, and Bessie led us to
+our new job&mdash;led us through a world that was strange and new to both
+Eunice and me, though poor Eunice had little heart for the newness and
+the strangeness of it all. In and out, and criss-cross, we threaded our
+way through little narrow streets bordered with stately "sky-scrapers,"
+and at last turned into Maiden Lane. We walked arm in arm till we came
+to an alley which Bessie said was Gold Street. It is more of a zigzag
+even than Maiden Lane, and is flanked by dark iron-shuttered warehouses
+and factories. Wolff's, our destination, was at the head of the street,
+and in a few minutes we were sitting side by side at the work-table,
+while our new forewoman, a cross-eyed Irish girl, was showing us what to
+do and how to do it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span></p><p>Making jewel-and silverware-cases was now our work. In the long,
+whitewashed workroom there were thirty other girls performing the same
+task, and on each of the five floors beneath there were as many more
+girls, pasting and pressing and trimming cases that were to hold rings,
+watches and bracelets, and spoons, knives, and forks&mdash;enough to supply
+all Christendom, it seemed to me. As beginners we were given each a
+dozen spoon-boxes to cover with white leather and line with satin. It is
+light, pleasant work, and was such an improvement on the sweat-shop
+drudgery that even Eunice smiled a little after a while.</p>
+
+<p>"Is youse lady-friends?" the forewoman asked when, in the course of ten
+minutes, she came to inspect our progress; on receiving an affirmative reply, she scowled.</p>
+
+<p>"Fiddlesticks! If I'd knowed youse was lady-friends, I'd jist told Izzy
+he could get some other girls," and she walked off, still scowling. The
+girls about us giggled.</p>
+
+<p>"Why doesn't Miss Gibbs like us to be lady-friends?" asked Bessie.</p>
+
+<p>A young Italian answered, "Because they always git to scrappin'."</p>
+
+<p>We all laughed&mdash;even Eunice&mdash;at such an ending to our friendship.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p><p>"We had a fearful row here yisterday," spoke up another; "and they wuz
+lady-friends&mdash;thicker than sardines, they wuz&mdash;till they got on the outs
+about a feller down on Pearl Street; a diamond-cutter he wuz, and they
+wuz both mashed on him&mdash;a Dutchman, too, he wuz, that wore ear-rings. I
+couldn't get mashed on a Dutchman, ear-rings or no ear-rings, could you?"</p>
+
+<p>"What did they do?" asked Bessie.</p>
+
+<p>"Do! They snapped at each other all morning over the work-table, and
+then one of them called the other a name that wuz something awful, and
+she up and spit in her face for it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't blame that girl for spitting in her face," interrupted a
+voice. "I don't blame her; lady-like or not lady-like, I'd have done the
+same thing. I'd spit in the President's face if I was in the White House
+and he was to call me such a name!"</p>
+
+<p>"And then what happened?" asked Bessie.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, they just up and at each other like two cats, tumbling over a stack
+of them there white velvet necklace-cases, and bloodying up each other's
+faces something fierce; and then Miss Gibbs she called Izzy; and Izzy he
+fired them on the spot."</p>
+
+<p>Despite these tales of strenuous conflicts, we were happy in our work at
+Wolff's. Our shop-mates were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> quiet, decent-looking girls, and their
+conversation was conspicuously clean&mdash;not always a characteristic of
+their class. Miss Gibbs, despite her justifiable prejudice against
+lady-friends, proved not unkind, and we congratulated ourselves as we
+bent over our work and listened to the cheerful hum of voices.</p>
+
+<p>After each case was finished,&mdash;after the satin linings and interlinings
+and the tuftings had been fitted and glued into their proper places, and
+the bit of leather drawn across the padded cover,&mdash;we could raise our
+eyes for a moment and look out upon a strange, fascinating world. The
+open windows on one side of the shop looked into the polishing-room of a
+neighboring goldsmith, and on the other side into a sunshiny workroom
+filled with swirling black wheels and flying belts among which the
+workmen kept up a dialogue in a foreign tongue. The latter place was
+near enough for a good-looking young man to attempt a flirtation with
+Bessie, in such moments as he was not carefully watching what seemed to
+be a clumsy mass of wax on the end of a wooden handle. All the long
+forenoon he kept up his man&oelig;uvers, watching his ugly bludgeon as if
+it were the very apple of his eye; carrying it to the window one moment
+and examining it under the microscope; then carrying it back to his
+wheel and beginning all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> over again. Late in the afternoon he came to
+the window for the hundredth time, and brandishing the bludgeon so that
+the sunshine fell directly upon it, held it aloft for us to admire the
+great glittering gem that now sparkled deep-bedded in the ugly wax.</p>
+
+<p>"I gif you dat if you marry me!" cried the diamond-cutter, striking a
+dramatic attitude for Bessie's benefit.</p>
+
+<p>Thus one, two days passed swiftly, and we had learned to make
+jewel-cases with tolerable rapidity. We had a half-hour for luncheon,
+during which Bessie, Eunice, and I went off by ourselves to the rear of
+the shop, where we ate our sandwiches in silence and gazed out upon the
+forest of masts that filled the East River lying below.</p>
+
+<p>On the fourth day Eunice and I ate luncheon alone. Bessie did not come
+that morning, nor send any excuse. Her absence gave me an opportunity,
+in this half-hour's respite from work, to get better acquainted with my
+silent and mysterious fellow-boarder; anything more than a most meager
+acquaintance was impossible at the place where we lived. Like the
+majority of semi-charitable institutions, the "home" was conducted on
+the theory that the only safety to morals, as well as to pocket-books,
+was espionage and isolation.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p><p>"It's awful up there, isn't it?" she remarked suddenly after we had
+discussed every possible cause for Bessie's absence.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, isn't it?" I replied, somewhat surprised, for this was the first
+time the girl had ever expressed any opinion about anything, so fearful
+did she seem of betraying herself.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you often wonder what brought me there that night?" she went
+on. "You've told me your story, and you don't know anything at all about
+mine. You must often wonder, though you are too considerate to ask. But
+I'm going to tell you now without asking. It was to keep me from going
+there," pointing through the window down to the river.</p>
+
+<p>"I'd had a lot of trouble,&mdash;oh, a terrible lot of trouble,&mdash;and it
+seemed as if there wasn't any place for me; and I walked down to the
+edge of the river up there at the end of East Fourteenth Street, and
+something stopped me just when I was ready to jump in. Why I didn't, I
+don't know," and the girl turned a stony face to the window.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it was hope and renewed courage, of course!" I replied quickly.
+"Everybody gets blue spells&mdash;when one is down on one's luck."</p>
+
+<p>Eunice shook her head. "No, it wasn't hope.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> It was because I was
+afraid&mdash;it was because I'm a coward. I'm too much of a coward to live,
+and I'm too much of a coward to die. You never felt as I do. You
+couldn't. I've lost my grip on everything. Everything's gone against me,
+and it's too late now for things to change. You don't know&mdash;<i>you don't
+know</i>, you and Bessie. If you did, you'd see how useless all your
+kindness is, in trying to get me to brace up. I've tried&mdash;my God! I have
+tried to feel that there's a life before me, but I can't&mdash;I can't.
+Sometimes, maybe for a minute, I'll forget what's gone by, and then the
+next minute the memory of it all comes back with a fearful stab. There
+is something that won't let me forget."</p>
+
+<p>"Hush! Eunice; don't talk so loud," I whispered as her passionate voice
+rose above the hum of the other girls in a far portion of the room.</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you it's no use&mdash;it's no use. I've lost my grip on things, and I
+can never catch hold again. I thought, maybe, when I started out with
+you and Bessie, and got to working again, there'd be a change. But there
+isn't any difference now from&mdash;from the night I went into that dormitory
+first. Now with you it would be different. What's happened to me might,
+maybe, happen to you; but you could fight it down. There's something
+inside of you that's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> stronger than anything that can hurt you from the
+outside. Most girls are that way. They get hurt&mdash;and hurt bad, and they
+cry a lot at the time and are miserable and unhappy; but after a while
+they succeed in picking themselves up, and are in the end as good,
+sometimes better, than ever. They forget in a little while all about it,
+and wind up by marrying some man who is really in love with them, and
+they are as happy as if nothing had ever happened."</p>
+
+<p>I looked at the occupant of cot No. 11 with mingled feelings of pity and
+amazement&mdash;pity for the hopelessness of her case, now more apparent than
+ever; amazement at her keen and morbid generalizations.</p>
+
+<p>"How old are you, Eunice?"</p>
+
+<p>"Twenty-four," she replied&mdash;"oh, I know what you're going to say: that I
+have my whole life before me, and all that. But I haven't. My life is
+all behind me."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"'I am the Captain of my Soul,</div>
+<div>I am the Master of my Fate,'"</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I quoted.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you are; but I am not," she replied simply, and turned and looked
+at me with her hopeless eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Poor, unfortunate Eunice! That night, as we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> walked home together, she
+revealed a little more about herself by telling me that she had recently
+been discharged from the hospital on "the Island." I did not need to
+inquire the nature of the illness that had left her face so white and
+drawn. Brief as my experience had been among the humble inmates of the
+"home," I had learned the expediency of not being too solicitous
+regarding the precise facts of such cases.</p>
+
+<p>The next day was Saturday, and still no Bessie. As we worked we
+speculated as to her absence, and decided to spend the afternoon looking
+her up. Meanwhile, although I had been managing to do my work a little
+better each day, Eunice had not been succeeding so well. Her apathy had
+been increasing daily, until she had lost any interest she might ever
+have had in trying to do her work well. On this morning the forewoman
+was obliged to give her repeated and sharp reproofs for soiling her
+materials and for dawdling over her work.</p>
+
+<p>"You seem to like to work," Eunice said once, breaking a long silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Not any better than you do, only I've got to, and I try to make the
+best of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you do. You like to work, and I don't, and that's the difference
+between us. And it's all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> the difference in the world, too. If I liked
+work for its own sake, like you do, there'd be some hope for me living things down."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder," she whispered, again breaking a long silence&mdash;"I wonder if
+Bessie had any man after her."</p>
+
+<p>I looked up suddenly, perhaps indignantly, and my reply was not
+encouraging to any conjectures along this line, as Eunice saw quickly.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry I offended you," she added hastily; "but I didn't think
+anything wrong of Bessie&mdash;you know I didn't. Only I've watched the boss
+following her around with his eyes ever since we came here to work. You
+didn't see, for you don't know as much about their devilment as I do;
+but I tell you, if anything was ever to happen that poor little girl
+through any man, I'd choke him to death with my own hands!"</p>
+
+<p>The satin-tufted box she was working on dropped from her fingers and
+clattered on the floor, bringing the forewoman down upon her with many
+caustic remarks. When the flurry was over I assured her that I thought
+Bessie fully capable of taking care of herself, although I had seen more
+of the manager's advances than Eunice gave me credit for observing.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p><p>At last noon came, and with it our first half-holiday. With the first
+shriek of the whistle we jumped up and began folding our aprons,
+preparatory to rushing out to find Bessie.</p>
+
+<p>"Where does she live?" asked Eunice.</p>
+
+<p>I looked at her in blank amazement, for I didn't know. I had never even
+heard the name of the street. I knew it was somewhere on the East Side;
+that was all. In all our weeks of acquaintanceship no occasion had
+arisen whereby Bessie should mention where she lived. I thought of
+Rosenfeld's. Perhaps some one there might know, and we took a Broadway
+car up-town. But Miss Higgins was away on her vacation, and none of the
+girls who still remained in the flower-shop knew any more about Bessie's
+whereabouts than I did. Thus it is in the busy, workaday world. Nobody
+knows where you come from, and nobody knows where you go. Eunice
+suggested looking in the directory; but as we found forty of the same
+name, it seemed hopeless. I did happen to know, however, that her father
+had once been a cutter or tailor; and so out of the forty we selected
+all the likeliest names and began a general canvass. After five hours of
+weary search, and after climbing the stairs of more than a score of
+tenement-houses, without success, we turned at last<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> into East Broadway,
+footsore and dusty. In this street, on the fifth floor of a baking
+tenement, we tapped at the door of Bessie's home. A little blonde woman
+answered the knock, and when we asked for Bessie she burst into sobs and
+pointed to a red placard on the door&mdash;the quarantine notice of the Board
+of Health, which we had not seen. And then Bessie's mother told us that
+four of her brood had been laid low with malignant diphtheria. The three
+younger ones were home, sick unto death, but they had yielded to the
+entreaties of the doctor and allowed him to take Bessie to Bellevue.
+Thither we hurried as fast as the trolley would take us, only to find
+the gates closed for the day. We were not relatives, we had no permits;
+and whether Bessie were dead or alive, we must wait until visiting-hours
+the next day to discover.</p>
+
+<p>What we found out the next day, when we filed into the superintendent's
+office with the ill-dressed horde of anxious Sunday-afternoon visitors,
+was hardly a surprise. We expected nothing but what Eunice had predicted
+from the first. Bessie had died the night before&mdash;died murmuring about
+poppies, the young doctor told us.</p>
+
+<p>"She's better off where she is than she'd be down at Wolff's," said
+Eunice, as we passed through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> the gates on to the street again. I made
+no comment, and we walked silently away from the big, ugly brick pile
+that holds such horrors for the poor. When we reached Third Avenue,
+Eunice stopped before a florist's window, and we looked in at a cluster
+of great white lilies. Neither spoke, however, and in a moment we passed
+on down Third Avenue, now brightly lighted and teeming with its usual
+gay Sunday night crowd. At last we turned into our own street, and were
+in front of the dark building we both called "home." Here Eunice caught
+my hand in hers, with a convulsive little motion, as might a child who
+was afraid of the dark. We climbed the stone steps together, and I
+pulled the bell, Eunice's grasp on my hand growing tighter and tighter.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-by; it's no use," she whispered suddenly, dropping my hand and
+moving away as we heard the matron fumbling at the lock; and before I
+could utter a word of protest, before I could reach forward and snatch
+her from some dread thing, I knew not what, she had disappeared among
+the shadows of the lamplit street.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"Where's the other girl?" asked the matron.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," I replied,&mdash;nor have I since been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> able to find the
+faintest clue to her whereabouts, if living, or her fate, if dead. From
+that moment at the door-step when she said good-by, Eunice stepped out
+of my life as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed her
+up. Is she dead or alive? Did the unhappy girl seek self-destruction
+that June night, or was she swept into that great, black whirlpool, the
+name of which even a girl of the workaday world mentions always with
+bated breath? I do not know. I never expect to know the fate of Eunice.
+It is only in stories that such things are made clear, usually, and this
+was only an incident in real life.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>XV</h2>
+
+<h3>I BECOME A "SHAKER" IN A STEAM-LAUNDRY</h3>
+
+<p>The next day, Monday, they buried Bessie in a big, shabby Jewish
+cemetery out on Long Island. I did not follow my comrade to the grave.
+Nor did I go to work. All that long, beautiful June day was spent in
+fruitless search for poor Eunice.</p>
+
+<p>This hopeless quest, begun on Monday, was continued for three days in
+the few hours that I could snatch between five o'clock, the closing-time
+at the shop, and ten o'clock, the curfew hour at the "home." On
+Wednesday the strain grew unbearable. All the associations of Wolff's
+were tinctured with memories of the dead Bessie and the lost Eunice.
+Under the counter, in the big pasteboard box, their checked-gingham
+aprons were still rolled up just as they had left them, with the
+scissors inside; and on the pine table under my eyes were their names
+and mine, scrawled in a lead-pencil by Bessie's hand,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> and framed with
+heavy lines. Their high stools, which were on either side of mine, had
+been given over to two new-comers, also "lady-friends," who chewed gum
+vigorously and discussed beaux and excursions to Coney Island with a
+happy vivacity that made my secret misery all the harder to bear. That
+night I went to the desk and drew my money, tucked the two aprons away
+in a bundle with my own, and said good-by to Wolff's. The sum total of
+my capital now amounted to five dollars; and with this I felt that I
+could afford to spend the remainder of the week trying to find Eunice,
+and trust to luck to get taken back at Wolff's the following Monday morning.</p>
+
+<p>After three days' systematic inquiry, I climbed the stairs to the
+dormitory late on Sunday night, no wiser than I had been a week before.
+My discouragement gave way to a thrill of joyous surprise when I
+descried a long, thin form stretched under the gray blanket of Eunice's
+cot. I sprang forward and laid an eager hand on the thin shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Gr-r-r! Don't you try gettin' fresh, Susie Jane, er I'll smash yer
+face!" snarled the angry voice of a new-comer, as she pulled the
+coverlet up to her eyes and rolled over on the other side.</p>
+
+<p>Monday morning I presented myself at the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>jewel-case factory, and asked
+Miss Gibbs to take me back. But I was already adjudged a "shiftless
+lot," not steady, and was accordingly "turned down." Then once more I
+scanned the advertising columns.</p>
+
+<p>"Shakers Wanted.&mdash;Apply to Foreman" was the first that caught my eye. I
+didn't know what a "shaker" was, but that did not deter me from forming
+a sudden determination to be one. The address took me into a street
+up-town&mdash;above Twenty-third Street&mdash;the exact locality I hesitate to
+give for reasons that shortly will become obvious. Here I found the
+"Pearl Laundry," a broad brick building, grim as a fortress, and
+fortified by a breastwork of laundry-wagons backed up to the curb and
+disgorging their contents of dirty clothes. Making my way as best I
+could through the jam of horses and drivers and baskets, I reached the
+narrow, unpainted pine door marked, "Employees' Entrance," and filed up
+the stairs with a crowd of other girls&mdash;all, like myself, seeking work.</p>
+
+<p>At the head of the stairs we filed into a mammoth steam-filled room that
+occupied an entire floor. The foreman made quick work of us. Thirty-two
+girls I counted as they stepped up to the pale-faced, stoop-shouldered
+young fellow, who addressed each one as "Sally," in a tone which,
+despite its <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>good-natured familiarity, was none the less businesslike
+and respectful. At last it came my turn.</p>
+
+<p>"Hello, Sally! Ever shook?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Ever work in a laundry?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; but I'm very handy."</p>
+
+<p>"What did you work at last?"</p>
+
+<p>"Jewel-cases."</p>
+
+<p>"All right, Sally; we'll start you in at three and a half a week, and
+maybe we'll give you four dollars after you get broke in to the
+work.&mdash;Go over there, where you seen them other ladies go," he called
+after me as I moved away, and waved his hand toward a pine-board
+partition. Here, sitting on bundles of soiled linen and on hampers, my
+thirty-two predecessors were corralled, each awaiting assignment to
+duty. They were dressed, literally, "some in rags and some in tags and
+some in velvet gowns." Calico wrappers brushed against greasy satin
+skirts, and faded kimono dressing-jackets vied in filth and slovenliness
+with unbelted shirt-waists. A faded rose bobbed in one girl's head, and
+on another's locks was arranged a gorgeous fillet of pale-blue ribbon of
+the style advertised at the time in every shop-window in New York as the
+"Du Barry." The scene was a sorry burlesque on the boudoir and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>
+ball-room, a grim travesty on the sordid realities of the kitchen on wash-day.</p>
+
+<p>"Did yez come in the barber's wagon?" asked a stupid Irish girl, looking
+at me curiously. I looked blank, and she repeated the question.</p>
+
+<p>"What does she mean?" I asked a more intelligent girl who was seated on
+a bundle in the corner.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't yez come in Tony's wagon?"</p>
+
+<p>"No; who's Tony?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Tony he's a barber&mdash;a Ginny barber&mdash;that goes out with a wagon when
+they run short of help, and he picks up any girls he can find and hauls
+them in. He brought three loads this morning. We thought Tony picked you
+up. Me and her," pointing to a black-browed girl who was nodding to
+sleep with her mouth wide open, "we come in the barber's wagon."</p>
+
+<p>The girl's face, fat, heavy, dough-colored, had become suffused with
+amiability, and giving her snoozing comrade a gentle push, she made room
+for me on the bundle beside her.</p>
+
+<p>"Ever worked at this job before?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No. Have you?"</p>
+
+<p>She replied with a sharp laugh, and flinging back the sleeve of her
+kimono, thrust out the stump of a wrist. At my exclamation of horror, she grinned.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span></p><p>"Why, that's nothing in this here business," she said. "It happens
+every wunst in a while, when you was running the mangles and was tired.
+That's the way it was with me: I was clean done out, one Saturday night,
+and I jist couldn't see no more; and first thing I know&mdash;Wo-o-ow! and
+that hand went right straight clean into the rollers. And I was jist
+tired, that's all. I didn't have nothing to drink all that day,
+excepting pop; but the boss he swore I was drunk, and he made the
+foreman swear the same thing, and so I didn't try to get no damages.
+They sent me to the horspital, and they offered me my old job back
+again; but I jist got up my spunk and says if they can't pay me some
+damages, and goes and swears I was drunk when I didn't have nothing but
+rotten pop, I says, I can up and go some place else and get my four dollars a week."</p>
+
+<p>Before I could ask what the poor creature would be able to do with only
+one hand, the foreman appeared in the door, and we trooped out at his
+heels. Down the length of the big room, through a maze of moving
+hand-trucks and tables and rattling mangles, we followed him to the
+extreme rear, where he deposited us, in groups of five and six, at the
+big tables that were ranged from wall to wall and heaped<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> high with wet
+clothes, still twisted just as they were turned out of the
+steam-wringer. An old woman with a bent back showed me the very simple
+process of "shaking."</p>
+
+<p>"Jist take the corners like this,"&mdash;suiting the action to the
+word,&mdash;"and give a shake like this, and pile them on top o' one
+another&mdash;like this," and with that she turned to her own "shaking" and
+resumed gossip with her side-partner, another old woman, who was roundly
+denouncing the "trash" that was being thrust upon her as table-mates,
+and throwing out palpable insults to the "Ginnies" who stood vis-&agrave;-vis,
+and who either didn't hear or, hearing, didn't understand or care.</p>
+
+<p>For the first half-hour I shook napkins bearing the familiar
+legend&mdash;woven in red&mdash;of a ubiquitous dairy-lunch place, and the next
+half-hour was occupied with bed-linen bearing the mark of a famous
+hostelry. During that time I had become fairly accustomed to my new
+surroundings, and was now able to distinguish, out of the steamy
+turmoil, the general features of a place that seethed with life and
+action. All the workers were women and girls, with the exception of the
+fifteen big, black, burly negroes who operated the tubs and the wringers
+which were ranged along the rear wall on a platform<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> that ran parallel
+with and a little behind the shakers' tables. The negroes were stripped
+to the waist of all save a thin gauze undershirt. There was something
+demoniacal in their gestures and shouts as they ran about the vats of
+boiling soap-suds, from which they transferred the clothes to the
+swirling wringers, and then dumped them at last upon the big trucks. The
+latter were pushed away by relays of girls, who strained at the heavy
+load. The contents of the trucks were dumped first on the shakers'
+tables, and when each piece was smoothed out we&mdash;the shakers&mdash;redumped
+the stacks into the truck, which was pushed on to the manglers, who
+ironed it all out in the hot rolls. So, after several other dumpings and
+redumpings, the various lots were tied and labeled.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile a sharp, incessant pain had grown out of what was in the first
+ten or fifteen minutes a tired feeling in the arms&mdash;that excruciating,
+nerve-torturing pain which comes as a result of a ceaseless muscular
+action that knows no variation or relaxation. To forget it, I began to
+watch the eight others at our particular table. There were four
+Italians, all stupid, uninteresting-looking girls, of anywhere from
+fifteen to twenty-five years old; there was a thin, narrow-chested girl,
+with delicate wrists<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> and nicely shaped hands, who seemed far superior
+to her companions, and who might have been pretty had it not been for
+the sunken, blue-black cavity where one eye should have been; there was
+a fat woman of forty, with a stiff neck, and of a religious temperament,
+who worked in a short under-petticoat and was stolidly indifferent to
+the conversation round her; the others were the two old dames&mdash;she who
+had initiated me, and her sprightlier though not less ancient crony,
+Mrs. Mooney. Both fairly bristled with spite and vindictiveness toward
+everything in general, and us new-comers in particular, and each
+sustained her flagging energies with frequent pinches of snuff and
+chunks of coffee-cake which they drew from inexhaustible pockets. My
+attempts at conversation with these two having been met with chilling
+silence, and as Mrs. Mooney had given me several painful thrusts with
+her sharp elbow when I happened to get too close to her, I took care to
+keep a safe distance, puzzled as to wherein I might have offended, and
+lapsing into a morbid interest in the gossip flying thick and fast around me.</p>
+
+<p>The target of scandal was "the queen," a big, handsome blonde girl of
+about twenty-five, who in a different environment and properly corseted
+and gowned would have been set down unquestionably<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> as "a voluptuous
+beauty." Here in the laundry, in stocking-feet and an unbelted black
+shirt-waist turned far in at the neck, she was merely "mushy," to use
+the adjective of her detractors. The queen owed her nickname to the
+boss, with whom she was said to "stand in," being "awful soft after
+him." She was a sort of assistant to the foreman, bossing the job when
+he was not around, and lending a hand in rush hours with true democratic
+simplicity such as only the consciousness of her prestige could warrant
+her in doing. Now she was assisting the black men load a truck, now
+helping a couple of girls push it across the floor, now helping us dump
+it on the table&mdash;laughing and joking all the while, but at the same time
+goading us on to the very limit of human endurance. She had been in the
+"Pearl" for seven years, slaved harder than any of us, and she looked as
+fresh and buoyant as if she never had known what work was. I rather
+liked the queen, despite the fact that I detected in her immediately a
+relentless task-master; everybody else seemed to like her,
+notwithstanding the malicious things they said about her.</p>
+
+<p>"Tired?" asked the one-eyed girl. "Yes, it's hard work, but it's steady.
+You're never out of a job if you're a steady shaker that can be relied on."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span></p><p>There was cheerfulness in her tone, and both the old women stopped
+talking.</p>
+
+<p>"Did yez come in the barber's wagon?" Mrs. Mooney asked. On being
+assured that we had not, she proceeded to establish amicable relations
+with the one-eyed girl and me by telling us she was glad we "weren't Ginnies, anyway."</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever happened to yer eye?" inquired the other crone of my companion.</p>
+
+<p>Unresentful of the blunt inquisitiveness, the girl responded cordially
+with her little story&mdash;glad, apparently, to have a listener.</p>
+
+<p>"It was something I caught in the hospital when I had appendicitis three
+years ago. When I was discharged my appendicitis was well, but my eye
+had took sore. The doctor he says when he seen it, 'That eye's too far
+gone, and it's got to come out, or the poison 'll spread to the t'other
+eye, and then you won't have no eyes at all.' My mother she didn't know
+nothing about it till it was all over. She'd have carried on awful if
+she'd knowed it. But it didn't hurt a bit. I went under chloroform, and
+when I come out of it I jist thought I'd been having a long sleep in a
+big brass bedstead, with hem-stitched sheets and things like that," and
+she pointed to the hotel linen we were all shaking.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span></p><p>"That's the way with them hospitals," said Mrs. Mooney,
+sympathetically, and proffering the heroine of the story a chunk of spice-cake.</p>
+
+<p>"You'd been better to ha' stayed at home. Poor folks don't have no
+chanst in them high-toned places."</p>
+
+<p>"Why don't you take off yer shoes like us, and let yer feet spread
+out?&mdash;it'll rest them," suggested Mrs. Mooney, now passing me a
+peace-offering of coffee-cake, and tightening her mouth in a grim
+determination to be civil.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, the one-eyed girl's story had wrought a transformation in these
+two sullen old women. All that was human in them had been touched by the
+tale of physical suffering, and we now met on common ground&mdash;the common
+ground of brute sympathy which one animal feels for another in distress.</p>
+
+<p>The work was now under full blast, and every one of the hundred and
+twenty-five girls worked with frenzied energy as the avalanche of
+clothes kept falling in upon us and were sent with lightning speed
+through the different processes, from the tubs to the packers' counters.
+Nor was there any abatement of the snowy landslide&mdash;not a moment to stop
+and rest the aching arms. Just as fast as the sweating negroes could
+unload the trucks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> into the tubs, more trucks came rolling in from the
+elevator, and the foaming tubs swirled perpetually, swallowing up, it
+would seem, all the towels and pillow-cases and napkins in Greater New
+York. Above the orchestra of noise I distinguished a faintly familiar
+voice, which I could not place until I heard:</p>
+
+<p>"And it was nothing but pop I had that day&mdash;I hadn't had nothing but
+rotten old pop all day!"</p>
+
+<p>From the girl's argument it was hard to determine whether she was more
+grieved at not having had stronger potations than pop on that fatal
+occasion, or at the implied aspersions upon her character for sobriety.
+Looking up, I saw that she was in one of the truck-teams. She had her
+one hand and arm strained against the rear of the sodden load, which she
+was urging forward with her hip. The load happened to be for our table,
+and as we dumped it out I asked her if there wasn't anything easier she
+could do. She responded cheerily:</p>
+
+<p>"No. You've got to have two hands to run the mangles, and you've got to
+have two hands to shake, and you've got to have two hands to tie up, but
+you can push a truck with one hand." Which statement of the case,
+combined with the cripple's optimism, made us laugh&mdash;all except the
+one-eyed girl, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>espying whom, the maimed girl suddenly changed the tone
+of levity with which she treated her own misfortune, and asked in a
+lowered voice: "What's the matter with yer eye?" And the hospital
+infection tale was repeated.</p>
+
+<p>Could a duchess have claimed greater grace than that poor, unlettered,
+uncouth creature's delicate perception of that subtle principle of
+courtesy, which allowed her to jest over her own misfortunes, but which
+prompted a gentle hesitation in speaking to another about hers!</p>
+
+<p>In the excruciating agony of the hours that followed, the trucks became
+a veritable anodyne for the pains that shot through my whole body.
+Leaning over their deep sides was a welcome relief from the strained,
+monotonous position at the tables. The one-eyed girl had likewise
+discovered the anodyne, and remarked upon it once as we dived into the wet freight.</p>
+
+<p>"It's so funny how one kind of pain sort of eases up another," she said;
+"I always feel good every time I see the truck coming, though trucking's
+far harder work than shaking if you had to do it steady. I wonder why it
+is. It was the same way with my eye. When it was getting better and just
+ached a little bit, steady, all the time, I used to wish I could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> have
+real hard jumping toothache, just for a change."</p>
+
+<p>"God love ye, and it's so," fervently exclaimed Mrs. Mooney.</p>
+
+<p>The day was terrifically hot outdoors, and with the fearful heat that
+came up through the floor from the engine-room directly under us,
+combined with the humidity of the steam-tilled room, we were all driven
+to a state of half-dress before the noon hour arrived. The women opened
+their dresses at the neck and cast off their shoes, and the foreman
+threw his suspenders off his shoulders, while the colored washers
+paddled about on the sloppy floor in their bare black feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't any men work in this place except the foreman?" I asked Mrs.
+Mooney, who had toiled a long time in the "Pearl" and knew everything.</p>
+
+<p>"Love of Mary!" she exclaimed indignantly; "and d' ye think any white
+man that called hisself a white man would work in sich a place as this,
+and with naygurs?"</p>
+
+<p>"But we work here," I argued.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we be wimmin," she declared, drawing a pinch of snuff into her
+nostrils in a manner that indicated finality.</p>
+
+<p>"But if it isn't good enough for a man, it isn't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> good enough for us,
+even if we are women!" I persisted.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at me half in astonishment, half in suspicion at my daring to
+question the time-honored order of things. Economics could make no
+appeal to her intelligence, and shooting a glance out of her hard old
+black eyes, she replied with a logic that permitted no gainsaying.</p>
+
+<p>"Love of Mary! if yez don't like yer job, ye can git out. Sure and we
+don't take on no airs around here!"</p>
+
+<p>At twelve the noise ceased, and a shrill whistle ushered in the
+half-hour's respite. The effect of that raucous shriek was as solemn, as
+awe-inspiring, for the first moment, as the ringing of the Angelus bell
+in a Catholic country-side. For one moment everybody stood motionless
+and mute, the women with arms akimbo on aching hips, the black washers
+with drooping, relaxed shoulders. Each tortured frame seemed to heave
+with an inaudible "Thank God!" and then we slowly scattered in all
+directions&mdash;some to the cloak-room, where the lunches were stored along
+with the wraps, some down the stairs into the street.</p>
+
+<p>On this day the one-eyed girl and I found a bundle of clothes large
+enough for two to sit on, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> shared our lunch. For half a ham sandwich
+she gave me a piece of cold sausage, and I gave her a dill pickle for a
+greasy doughnut. The inevitable bottle of "pop" neither of us was able
+to open until the foreman came along and lent his assistance. He
+lingered a moment to talk the usual inanities that pass between a
+democratic foreman and a couple of new girls. Under his jovial exterior
+there seemed to be a vein of seriousness, amounting almost to sadness
+when one looked at his well-modeled face and his steady gray eyes. Tall
+and pale and prematurely bent, he had a certain distinction, as if he
+had been cut out for better things. His manner had lost all the easy
+familiarity of a few hours before, and he asked us in the kindest tone
+possible how we liked the work, and heartened us with the assurance that
+it wouldn't be nearly so hard in a few days, telling us to "stand
+slack-like" and see if it didn't make the pain in our backs better. By
+slack-like he meant stoop-shouldered, as everybody grows sooner or later in a laundry.</p>
+
+<p>The foreman's hygienic lecture was interrupted by the warning rumble of
+the awakening machinery, and we scurried back to our table to make
+practical test of his theory. We followed it to the letter, but, like
+every other palliative of pain, it soon lost its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> virtue, and the long
+afternoon was one of unspeakable agony. There were now not only aching
+backs and arms and legs, but feet parboiled to a blister on the burning
+floors. The air was rent with lamentations, and before long my
+side-partner and I had also shed our shoes. By four o'clock everybody
+had sunk into a state of apathetic quiet, and even the exuberant Queen
+lost something of her vivaciousness, and attended strictly to the
+business of goading us on to our tasks.</p>
+
+<p>"We're two days behind with them hospital sheets," she screamed to one
+relay; "S&mdash;&mdash; Hotel Barber Shop got to go out to-night," which
+information brought groans from Mrs. Mooney.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother of God!" she cried. "Sure and that means nine o'clock to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't we going to get out at six?" asked the one-eyed girl, while I
+glanced dismally at the never-ending train of trucks that kept rolling
+out upon the washers' platform, faster now than at any other time of the day.</p>
+
+<p>"God love ye! dearie, no," returned Mrs. Mooney. "Ye'll never get
+outside <i>this</i> shop at six any night, unless ye're carried out dead.
+We're in luck to get out as early as eight."</p>
+
+<p>"Every night?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span></p><p>"Sure, every night exceptin' Saturday, and then it's twelve to
+half-past one."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that's not so bad if you have a half-holiday."</p>
+
+<p>"Half-holiday!" echoed Mrs. Mooney. "Will ye listen to that! A
+half-holiday, indeed!" Then the mocking voice grew kinder. "Sure and
+it's every minute of twelve o'clock or a half-hour into Sunday mornin'
+afore you ever see the outside of this place of a Saturday in
+summer-time, with all the washin' and ironin' for the summer hotels and
+the big bugs as is at the sea-shore."</p>
+
+<p>"Youse ain't got no kick coming," said one of the Ginney girls. "Youse
+gets six cents an hour overtime, and youse 'll be mighty glad to make that exter money!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Mooney glared viciously at the interlopers. "Yes, and if it wasn't
+for the likes of yez Ginnies that 'll work for nothing and live in
+pig-pens, the likes of us white people wouldn't have to work nights."</p>
+
+<p>"Well I made ninety-six cents' overtime last week," spoke up the silent
+fat woman in the under-petticoat, "and I was thankful to the Lord to get it."</p>
+
+<p>Of the two hours or more that followed I have only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> a hazy recollection
+of colored men bending over the pungent foam, of straining, sweating
+women dragging their trucks round and round the great steaming-room. I
+remembered nothing whatever of the moment when the agony was ended and
+we were released for the day. Up to a certain dim borderland I remember
+that my back ached and that my feet dragged heavily over the burning
+floor, two pieces of boiling flesh. I do remember distinctly, however,
+suddenly waking up on Third Avenue as I was walking past a delicatessen
+store, and looking straight into the countenance of a pleasant-faced
+woman. I must have walked right into her, for she seemed amused, and
+went on her way laughing at something&mdash;probably my look of surprise as
+the impact brought me suddenly to full consciousness. A clock was
+hanging in the delicatessen-store window, and the hour-hand stood at
+nine. A cooling sea-breeze was blowing up from the south, and as I
+continued my walk home I realized that I had just passed out of a sort
+of trance,&mdash;a trance superinduced by physical misery,&mdash;a merciful
+subconscious condition of apathy, in which my soul as well as my body
+had taken refuge when torture grew unbearable.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>XVI</h2>
+
+<h3>IN WHICH IT IS PROVED TO ME THAT THE DARKEST HOUR COMES JUST BEFORE THE DAWN</h3>
+
+<p>The next morning I asked Mrs. Mooney what time it was when we left the
+laundry the evening before, and she said half-past eight. Then I
+recounted the strange experience of the trance, which did not arouse the
+interest I had expected.</p>
+
+<p>"That's nothing. That's the way we all get sometimes," she declared. "If
+we didn't get into them trance-spells there'd be none of us workin' here at all, at all."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, indeed," said a prayerful voice. "Praise God, it's one of his
+blessid pervisions to help us bear our crosses."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think the Lord's got much to do with our breaking backs or
+feet, do you?" asked the one-eyed girl, as we turned to unload a truck.
+"Now I'm not an unbeliever, and I believe in God and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> Jesus Christ, all
+right; but I sometimes think they don't do all these things that the
+Methodists and Salvation Army says they do. Somehow, I don't believe God
+knows anything about my eye or that one-armed girl's getting hurt in the
+roller. I used to believe everything I heard the evangelist say, but I
+don't think no more that religion is what it's cracked up to be." A few
+moments later she asked if I was a Protestant, too, and receiving an
+affirmative, proceeded to express herself on the superior merits of that
+form of faith as compared with the Catholic, against which she had all
+the narrow-minded ignorance and superstition which, strange to say, only
+too often characterize the better element of the class to which she
+belonged. This girl's unreasonable prejudice against something of which
+she knew not the first thing presented a paradox universal in her world.
+The Catholic Church as an institution was her enemy, and the enemy of
+all Protestants. "If they could kill you, and not be found out by the
+law, they'd do it just as quick as wink, because the priest would bail
+them out of hell for a dollar and a quarter." And yet, when it came to
+the concrete and personal, she had to admit that all the Catholics she
+had ever known were "just about as good as Protestants."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span></p><p>This religious discussion was carried on in a low voice, with many
+side-glances toward the Catholic side of the table, as if danger
+threatened were they to hear a word of it. I knew, however, that there
+was nothing to fear from that quarter. There was only one religious
+conscience there, and that belonged to the one-eyed girl herself. From
+innumerable other instances I had met with before I had come to this
+generalization: that bigotry and bitter prejudices in matters of faith,
+deplorable as they at first seem to be, mark a distinct step in the
+social evolution and moral development of the ignorant and degraded.
+Nobody else at that table was far enough along to worry herself with
+principles of faith.</p>
+
+<p>"I think the Salvation Army's a kind of good religion," she continued;
+"only they&mdash;" but I heard no more; we were interrupted by a flurry of
+interest in the front, which spread quickly to our region, as a portly
+man in an automobile coat and Panama hat made his way by the
+mangle-machines and the tables. The foreman, diffident and uncertain,
+was walking by his side; and from the peremptory and numerous
+instructions he was receiving, it became patent that his companion was
+the "boss." Everybody looked hastily, stealthily, at the Queen,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> who hid
+her pleasure under a very transparent veil of dissembling, as she helped
+us unload a truck. Never before had I heard the queen laugh so merrily,
+and never before had I realized what a superb, handsome animal she was.
+There was a certain rhythmic movement as she raised and lowered her body
+over the truck. The excitement of the moment added a deeper color to her
+always splendid rose-and-white complexion, upon which the steam-laden
+atmosphere distilled perpetually that soft dewiness characteristic of
+the perfect complexion of young children or of goddesses. And like a
+goddess the queen appeared that moment,&mdash;an untidy, earth-chained
+goddess, mirthful, voluptuous.</p>
+
+<p>"She thinks she's mighty fine, don't she?" whispered my one-eyed friend.</p>
+
+<p>The boss halted at the truck, and the queen looked up with ill-feigned
+surprise, as if she hadn't known for five minutes that he was in the
+room. He seemed the personification of prosperous, ignorant vulgarity,
+and his manner, as he swept his eye carelessly over his queen's
+subjects, was one of good-natured insolence. He didn't tarry long, and
+if guilty of the gentle dalliance of which he was accused, it was plain
+to be seen that he did not allow it to interfere with the discipline of the "Pearl."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p><p>At lunch-time the one-eyed girl and I went off to the same corner as
+before, and no sooner had we begun to divide our pickles and sandwiches
+than in sauntered the foreman, munching alternately from a cylinder of
+bologna sausage in one hand and a chunk of dry bread in the other.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, how goes it?" he asked pleasantly, dropping his long, lank frame
+upon a bundle of hotel table-linen. "Did you try my advice about standin' slack-like?"</p>
+
+<p>We replied to his question while the one-eyed girl carved a dill pickle
+and a sweet pickle each into three portions.</p>
+
+<p>He related how he had come to the "Pearl" six years ago, and had worked
+himself up to his present job, which was not to be sneezed at, he said,
+considering that eighteen dollars a week wasn't to be picked up every
+day&mdash;and steady work, too, no layoffs and no shut-downs. He emphasized
+the fact, evidently very important in his mind, that he wasn't married,
+that he had not met any girl yet that would have him, which my companion
+insisted couldn't possibly be true, or if it was, then none of the girls
+he had ever asked had any taste at all. He lived at home with his
+mother, whom he didn't allow to "work out" since he'd been big enough to
+earn a living for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> her. There was a sister, too, at home, who had a job
+in a near-by manufactory; but she was engaged, and going to be married
+in her "intended's" vacation. Then, the foreman thought, he'd have to
+get a wife himself, if he could find anybody to have him. And she
+wouldn't have to work, either&mdash;not on your tintype! She would live at
+home with his mother, and darn his socks and sew on his buttons, and
+she'd have no washing or ironing to do, as he got his all done for
+nothing in the "Pearl." That perquisite went along with the eighteen
+dollars a week. Oh, she'd have things as nice as any hard-working young
+fellow could give her.</p>
+
+<p>"Would she have to be purty?" asked the one-eyed girl, who seemed
+unusually interested in this hypothetical wife, and who took such a
+lively interest in the foreman and his plans that I felt my heart sink
+in pity for the poor maimed creature. Was she hanging breathless on the
+foreman's reply to this question? If so, there was a certain comfort in
+the gallant answer.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I should say not," he replied, as I thought with gentle
+consideration of her to whom he was speaking; "I don't think I could
+ever trust a wife who was a ten-thousand-dollar beaut'. She'd want to
+gad too much. I don't think looks count for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> much; and I'd think she was
+pretty, anyway, if I was terrible stuck on her. Them things don't make
+much difference only in story-papers. But there's one thing she would
+have to be, and that is handy at doing things. I wouldn't marry a lazy
+girl, and I wouldn't marry a girl that wasn't a working girl."</p>
+
+<p>The engines began to give out a warning rumble, and the foreman
+scrambled somewhat reluctantly to his feet, and stretching out his long
+arms, started off.</p>
+
+<p>"Say, that feller's clean, dead gone on you," remarked my companion,
+closing her hand over mine in a pressure that was full of congratulation
+and honest delight.</p>
+
+<p>I scouted the idea, but nevertheless I became suddenly conscious of a
+complete change in his manner from the easy familiarity of the morning
+before. Instead of the generic name of "Sally," or the Christian name
+which on better acquaintance he applied to the other girls, he had
+politely prefixed a "Miss" to my surname. There had come, too, a
+peculiar feeling of trust and confidence in him&mdash;a welcome sensation in
+this horrible, degraded place; and it was with gratefulness that I
+watched him disappear in the steamy vista, throwing off his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>suspenders
+preparatory to plunging into the turmoil of the afternoon's work now under way.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure thing he is, I'd bet my life on it," she insisted, as we, too,
+hurried back to the table and took up our towels and napkins once more.
+"There's no mistakin' them signs, and you'd be a little fool if you
+wasn't to help him along. Men's all sort of bashful, some more 'n
+others, and it's a good thing to help along. I like the looks of that
+fellow&mdash;he'd be awful silly and soft with his wife."</p>
+
+<p>There was gentle solicitude in the voice, and looking up, I was almost
+startled with the radiance of the girl's face&mdash;the face of a good woman
+who loves, and who takes a generous interest in the love affairs of
+another. As we leaned over the truck and began to haul out its wet
+freight, she whispered to me:</p>
+
+<p>"I know all about it because I've been there myself. I've got a
+gentleman-friend, too, and he's awful nice to me. He's been going with
+me five years, and he didn't shake me when I lost my eye. Lots of
+fellows I know would have backed out. That's what I like about that
+foreman. I think he'd do just the same by a girl he loved as Jim did to
+me. We'd have been married this long time, only Jim's got his hands full
+with a crazy mother, and he says she'll never go to any asylum s' long's
+he's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> able to keep her; and so Jim's aunt she lives with them and tends
+his mother, and it takes 'most all Jim makes, because his mother's sick
+all the time, too, and has to have the doctor and be humored. But I like
+a man that's good to his mother. Jim isn't overly strong, either, and is
+likely to break down."</p>
+
+<p>Late in the afternoon my partner was overcome by an attack of
+sick-headache, and dropped with nausea and exhaustion. Mrs. Mooney and
+the Queen helped her to her feet.</p>
+
+<p>"It's them pickles and them rotten cold lunches you girls eat," declared
+Mrs. Mooney, who was fond of talking on the nutritious properties of
+food. "Now I says, the Lord only give me one stummick, and when that's
+wore out he'll never give me another, and I can't never buy one with no
+money, and I never put anything in that stummick at noon but a good cold
+beer and a good hot plate of soup, and that's what you ought to do. Only
+cost you five cents for the both of them together, down to Devlin's
+place. We go there every day," jerking her head in the direction of her
+crony, "and you can go along if ye have a mind to."</p>
+
+<p>In accordance with this invitation, we became patrons of Devlin's the
+very next day. Promptly at twelve we hurried out, sleeves still rolled
+up and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> our damp aprons unremoved. There was no time for making a
+toilet, Mrs. Mooney insisted, as Devlin's was three blocks away, and we
+had only a half-hour. Across Lexington, across Third Avenue, and down
+one block, we came to a corner saloon, and filed in the "ladies'
+entrance." The room was filled with workmen drinking beer and smoking at
+the little round tables, and when they saw us each man jumped up, and
+grabbing his glass, went out into the barroom. Commenting upon this to
+Mrs. Mooney, she explained as we seated ourselves:</p>
+
+<p>"Sure, and what'd ye expect! Sure, and it's a proper hotel ye're in, and
+it's dacent wurrkin'-men that comes here, and they knows a lady when
+they see her, and they ups and goes!"</p>
+
+<p>In response to Mrs. Mooney's vigorous order, "Six beers with the
+trimmin's!" a waiter appeared presently with a steaming tray.</p>
+
+<p>"Now eat that, and drink that, and see if they don't go to the spot,"
+cried the old woman, gaily, and we all fell to, with table manners more
+eager than elegant. Whatever the soup was made of, it seemed to me the
+best soup I had ever eaten in New York, and I instantly determined never
+again to blame a working man or woman for dining in a saloon in
+preference to the more godly and respectable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> dairy-lunch room. We all
+ate ravenously, and I, who never before could endure the sight or smell
+of beer, found myself draining my "schooner" as eagerly as Mrs. Mooney herself.</p>
+
+<p>"My! but that braces me up," she declared, sighing deeply and licking
+the froth from her lips; "it's almost as good as whisky." It was a
+propitious moment to ask questions, and I inquired how long she had
+worked at the "Pearl."</p>
+
+<p>"Eighteen months, off and on. I gets the rheumatism and stay home
+sometimes. I believe in taking care of yer back. I says, I've only got
+one back, and when that's wore out the Lord ain't going to give me
+another. So I stay home; but it's so lonesome I'm always mighty glad to
+get to work ag'in."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The long, long days sped by, their torture relieved by such comfort as
+we could find in the gossip of the table, and in daily excursions to
+Devlin's, where I had become a regular patron. The foreman, too, added a
+little variety to the monotony by coming to our table sometimes, and
+shaking clothes for a few moments with us, while he gossiped with the
+one-eyed girl and me, which unusual proceeding filled her romantic soul
+with all sorts of happy anticipation. On Saturday morning, after he had
+come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> and gone, she whispered ecstatically: "That fellow is stuck on
+you, and I'll bet he'll be askin' you to go to the theayter with
+him&mdash;just see if he don't!"</p>
+
+<p>But alas for woman's dreams! The next day we saw the boss coming across
+the floor, this time alone. He sauntered up to our table, began to fling
+jokes at us all in a manner of insolent familiarity, and asked the names
+of the new faces. When he came to me he lingered a moment and uttered
+some joking remarks of insulting flattery, and in a moment he had
+grasped my bare arm and given it a rude pinch, walking hurriedly away.
+In a few moments the foreman came back and motioned me to go with him,
+and I followed to the front of the room, where the boss stood smoking
+and joking with the wrappers. The foreman retired a respectful distance,
+and the boss, after looking me over thoughtfully, informed me that I was
+to be promoted Monday morning to the wrappers' counter.</p>
+
+<p>"And now run away, and be a good girl the rest of the day," he
+concluded, with a wave of the hand, and I rushed back to the table, more
+disgusted with the man and his manner than I was thankful to him for my
+promotion to a job that would pay me five dollars a week.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't I tell you so!" exclaimed my friend,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> amid the excited comments
+and questions of the others at the table. "That's some of the foreman's
+doing, and I'm real glad for you&mdash;it's nothing more than what I've been
+expectin', though."</p>
+
+<p>This opinion was not shared, however, by the rest of my companions, who
+repeated divers terrible tales of moral ruin and betrayal, more or less
+apocryphal, wherein the boss was inevitably the villain. I now found
+myself suddenly the cynosure of all eyes, the target of a thousand
+whispered comments, as I moved about the workroom. The physical agony of
+aching back and blistered feet was too great, though, for me to feel any
+mental distress over the fact&mdash;for the moment at least. In the awful
+frenzy of the Saturday-afternoon rush, greater than that of any other
+day of the week, I did not care much what they thought or said about the boss and me.</p>
+
+<p>I was shaking my towels and napkins, and trying to look as indifferent
+as I believed I felt, when the foreman beckoned me again, and stepping
+aside, thrust a piece of yellow wrapping-paper into my hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Read it when nobody's looking," he said in a low voice; "and don't
+think wrong of me for meddling in what's not my business"; and he was off again.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span></p><p>A few minutes later I read:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"You'd better give up this job. It's no place for a girl that wants
+to do right. Come back Monday and get your money; and I wouldn't
+stay to-night after six o'clock, if I was you, but go home and
+rest. If you can't get a job as good as this inside of a day or
+two, I think my sister can get one for you in her place; but you
+won't stay here if you take my advice.</p>
+
+<p class="center">"Yours truly,</p>
+
+<p class="right">"J. P.</p>
+
+<p>"P.S. Please don't show this, or I'd lose my job; and be sure to
+come Monday evening for your money."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>I made at once for the cloak-room. When I emerged, a moment later, it
+was to find the narrow passage obstructed by one of the big soiled-linen
+trucks, over which "J. P." bent industriously, as if he hadn't another
+thought in the world beyond the sorting of table-cloths and napkins.
+Suddenly he lifted up his lank frame, and seeing one of his workpeople
+making her escape, he called out:</p>
+
+<p>"It's not six o'clock yet!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p><p>"I don't care if it isn't; I am going home," I replied promptly.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter?" he asked in a loud voice, and then, as he drew
+near, added in an undertone:</p>
+
+<p>"You read my note?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," I replied.</p>
+
+<p>"S'pose you kind of wonder at me doing it?" he went on, moving with me
+toward the staircase.</p>
+
+<p>"No; I guessed right away," I answered.</p>
+
+<p>We had now reached the top of the stairs leading to the street door, and
+were out of ear-shot of the busy workroom. The curious faces and craning
+necks were lost to us through an interposing veil of steam. The foreman
+grasped my extended hand in a limp, hasty clasp as I began to move down the steps.</p>
+
+<p>"You guessed part, but not all," he whispered, turning away.</p>
+
+<p>I dragged myself to the end of the block and turned into Lexington
+Avenue just as the six-o'clock whistles began to blow. So much I
+remember very distinctly, but after that all is an indistinct blur of
+clanging street-cars, of jostling crowds. I do not know whether I had
+lost my senses from the physical agony I was enduring, though still able
+to perform the mechanical process of walking, or whether it was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> a case
+of somnambulism; but I know that I walked on, all unconscious of where I
+was going, or of my own identity, until I came in collision with some
+one, and heard a feminine voice beg my pardon. Then a little cry, and
+two arms were thrown about me, and I looked up into the smiling face of
+Minnie Plympton&mdash;Minnie Plympton as large as life and unspeakably
+stunning in a fresh shirt-waist and sailor-hat. She was smiling at me
+like a princess issuing from her enchantment in a rose-bush; and lest
+she should vanish as suddenly as she had appeared, I clutched wildly at
+her arm, trembling and sobbing at this delicious awakening from the
+horrible nightmare that had been my existence for so many days.</p>
+
+<p>We were standing on the corner of Lexington Avenue and a cross-town
+thoroughfare, and ever after must that spot remain in my mind as the
+actual turning-point of my fortunes&mdash;indeed, the very turning-point of
+my whole life. As I look back upon that beautiful June evening, I again
+hear the rumble of the elevated trains in the street beyond, and again I
+hear the clang of the electric cars as they swirl out of the avenue into
+the street. Probably every man and woman who ever came a stranger to a
+great city has his or her own particular secret and holy place where
+angels came and ministered in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> the hour of need. I do not doubt it, but
+I do often wonder whether every such person visits his sacred place as
+often as I visit mine. I go to mine very often, especially in
+summer-time, about six o'clock, when, amid the roar and the turmoil and
+the banalities of the real and the actual, I recall the wondrous tale of
+the Burning Bush. For there God appeared to me that evening&mdash;the God who
+had hidden his face for so long.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you look as weak as a kitten&mdash;you look sick!" Minnie declared.
+"You need a good cup of tea and to be put to bed, and I'm going to be
+the one to do it for you!"</p>
+
+<p>I was half dazed as Minnie Plympton bundled me into a passing electric
+car; and then, with my head leaning comfortably on Minnie Plympton's
+plump shoulder, and with Minnie Plympton's strong arm about my aching
+body, I was jolted away somewhere into a drowsy happiness.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>EPILOGUE</h2>
+
+<p>Three years have elapsed since that last day in the "Pearl Laundry" and
+my providential meeting with Minnie Plympton.</p>
+
+<p>The events of those three years may be recounted in almost as few
+sentences, for prosperous working girls, like happy nations, have no
+history. And we have been very prosperous, Minnie Plympton and I. We, I
+say, because from the moment of our unforeseen meeting in the
+hurly-burly of that street corner, the interests of Minnie Plympton's
+life and of mine were to become, for the succeeding year, almost inseparable.</p>
+
+<p>I said we have both been very prosperous. But Minnie Plympton has been
+more than that: she has been successful&mdash;successful in the only real way
+a woman can, after all, be successful. Minnie is married. She is the
+wife of an enterprising young business man, and the mother of a charming
+baby. She has been married nearly two years, and lives in a pretty
+cottage in a peaceful suburb. It was what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> the world would call a good
+match, and Minnie declares she is perfectly happy. And no doubt she is,
+else that honest creature would not be so bent upon making matches for everybody else.</p>
+
+<p>As for myself, I have been merely prosperous&mdash;prosaically and
+uninterestingly, though none the less agreeably, prosperous. I do not
+know whether I am happy or not. I am still a working girl, and by all
+the portents of the dream-book I am foredoomed eternally to remain a
+wage-earner in spite of all Mrs. Minnie's good offices. For I was born
+on a Saturday; and "Saturday's child must work for its living."</p>
+
+<p>Now, I do not care to be accused of a superstitious faith in
+dream-books, but I do want to say that I have found all sorts of
+inspiration in a philosophical acceptance of that oracle attaching to my
+unfortunate birthday. If Saturday's child must work for her living, why
+not make the best of it? Why not make the most advantageous terms
+possible with Fate? why not work with, and not against, that inexorable
+Forelady, in co&ouml;peration with her plans and along the lines of her least resistance?</p>
+
+<p>This I have tried to do. How I have done it, and what the results have
+been, I shall now try to sketch with not more attention to tedious
+details than I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> feel justified in assuming may be of some help and
+encouragement to other strugglers.</p>
+
+<p>I became a stenographer and typewriter, earning twenty dollars a week. I
+worked hard for my money, and the day was still a long day. I went to
+work at nine o'clock in the morning, and while I was supposed to get off
+at five, and sometimes did, I was often obliged to work till six or seven.</p>
+
+<p>And this I called prosperity? Yes; for me this was prosperity, when I
+remembered the circumstances of my beginnings.</p>
+
+<p>When I met Minnie Plympton on the street corner, that hot summer night,
+I was "dead broke," not only in purse, but in body and spirit as well.
+She took me home with her to the two small rooms where she was doing
+light housekeeping, and where we continued to live together until her
+marriage a year later broke up our happy domestic partnership. A few
+weeks after Minnie took me home with her I got a position in the notion
+department of one of the large stores. I received only four dollars a
+week; but, as our rent was small and our living expenses the very
+minimum, I was able to meet my half of the joint expenditure. I worked
+four months at selling pins and needles and thread and whalebone and a
+thousand and one other things to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> be found in a well-stocked notion
+department; and then, by a stroke of good luck and Minnie Plympton's
+assistance, I got a place as demonstrator of a new brand of tea and
+coffee in the grocery department of the same "emporium." My new work was
+not only much lighter and pleasanter, but it paid me the munificent
+salary of eight dollars a week.</p>
+
+<p>But I did not want to be a demonstrator of tea and coffee all my life. I
+had often thought I would like to learn shorthand and typewriting. The
+demonstrator of breakfast foods at the next counter to mine was taking a
+night course in bookkeeping; which gave me the idea of taking a similar
+course in stenography. And then the Long Day began in earnest. I went to
+night-school five nights out of every week for exactly sixty weeks,
+running consecutively save for a fortnight's interim at the Christmas
+holidays, when we worked nights at the store. On Saturday night, which
+was the off night, I did my washing and ironing, and on Sunday night I
+made, mended, and darned my clothes&mdash;that is, when there was any making,
+mending, or darning to be done. As my wardrobe was necessarily slender,
+I had much time to spare. This spare time on Sunday nights I spent in
+study and reading. I studied English composition and punctuation, both
+of which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> I would need later on when I should become a stenographer. I
+also brushed up on my spelling and grammar, in which, I had been
+informed&mdash;and correctly&mdash;the average stenographer is sadly remiss.</p>
+
+<p>As for reading, which was the only recreation my life knew, it was of a
+most desultory, though always mercenary sort. I read every book I could
+get out of the circulating library which, from its title or general
+character as summarized in the newspaper reviews, I thought might help
+me to solve the problem of earning a good livelihood. The title of one
+book particularly attracted me&mdash;a book which was so much in demand that
+I had to wait a whole six months before I succeeded in getting it
+through the slow and devious process peculiar to circulating libraries.
+That book was "Up from Slavery," and it brought home to me as nothing
+else could have done what was the real trouble with myself and all the
+rest of the struggling, ill-paid, wretched working women with whom I had
+come in contact during my apprenticeship. What that trouble was I shall
+revert to later.</p>
+
+<p>When I had thoroughly learned the principles of my trade and had
+attained a speed of some hundred and odd words a minute, the hardest
+task was yet before me. This task was not in finding a position,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> but in
+filling that position satisfactorily. My first position at ten dollars a
+week I held only one day. I failed to read my notes. This was more
+because of fright and of self-consciousness, however, than of
+inefficiency. My next paid me only six dollars a week, but it was an
+excellent training-school, and in it I learned self-confidence, perfect
+accuracy, and rapidity. Although this position paid me two dollars less
+than what I had been earning brewing tea and coffee and handing it over
+the counter, and notwithstanding the fact that I knew of places where I
+could go and earn ten dollars a week, I chose to remain where I was.
+There was method in my madness, however, let me say. I had a considerate
+and conscientious employer, and although I had a great deal of work, and
+although it had to be done most punctiliously, he never allowed me to
+work a moment overtime. He opened his office at nine in the morning, and
+I was not expected before quarter after; he closed at four sharp. This
+gave me an opportunity for further improving myself with a view to
+eventually taking not a ten-dollar, but a twenty-dollar position. I went
+back to night-school and took a three months' "speed course," and at the
+same time continued to add to my general education and stock of
+knowledge by a systematic reading of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> popular books of science and
+economics. I became tremendously interested in myself as an economic
+factor, and I became tremendously interested in other working girls from
+a similar point of view. Of science and economics I knew nothing when I
+started out to earn my living.</p>
+
+<p>One day I answered an advertisement calling for the sort of stenographer
+I now believed myself to be. It brought a response signed with the name
+of a large religious publishing house. I got the position, beginning
+with a salary of fifteen dollars a week, which was to be increased to
+twenty dollars provided I could fill the position. That I should succeed
+in doing so, there was evident doubt in my employers' minds, and no
+wonder! For I was the fifth to attempt it.</p>
+
+<p>My work consisted for the most part in taking dictation from the editor
+of the periodical published weekly by the house&mdash;letters to
+contributors, editorials, and special articles. Also, when it was found
+that I had some intelligent, practical knowledge of grammar and
+English&mdash;and here was where my studies of the preceding year bore
+fruit&mdash;I was intrusted with the revision and correction of the least
+important of the manuscripts, thus relieving the busy editors of one of
+their most irksome tasks.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span></p><p>One day I had occasion to mention to the editor some of the strenuous
+experiences I had undergone in my struggle to attain a decent living. He
+was startled&mdash;not to say a little shocked&mdash;that a young woman of
+apparently decent birth and upbringing should have formed such an
+intimate acquaintance with the dark side of life. Inspired by his
+sympathetic interest, I boldly interviewed the editor of a well-known
+monthly magazine, with the result that I immediately prepared two papers
+on certain of my experiences; and, to my surprise and delight, they were accepted.</p>
+
+<p>And, somehow, with the appearance of those two articles&mdash;the first
+fruits of authorship&mdash;part of the horror and loathing of that unhappy
+period of servitude fell away from me; the sordid suffering, the hurt to
+pride, the ineffaceable scar on heart and soul I felt had not been in
+vain. I can now look back upon the recent, still vivid past without a
+shiver; for there is comfort in the thought that what I have undergone
+is to be held up to others as a possible lesson and warning.</p>
+
+<p>And now a word as to the verity of this narrative. Have I actually been
+through all that I have described? Yes, and more; and in other cities beside New York.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p><p>Yet for the sake of unity the order of things has been somewhat
+changed; and no record is given of many weeks, and even months, when
+life flowed uneventfully, if not smoothly, on.</p>
+
+<p>"But," says the thoughtful reader, "do your sordid experiences of some
+two or three years ago match conditions of to-day?" and I answer:
+Generally speaking, they do; because lately I reinforced memory by
+thorough investigation.</p>
+
+<p>I went further than that: when it came to me to write this little
+book&mdash;that is so absolutely a transcript from real life&mdash;I voluntarily
+labored, a week here, a week there, at various trades allied to those
+that previously had been my sole means of livelihood, and all the time
+living consistently the life of the people with whom I was thus
+temporarily associated.</p>
+
+<p>There were, of course, many little points that when I was a worker in
+earnest I had not eyes to see, but which my recent conscious study
+brought out in proper perspective.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it was as a working girl that I learned to know most of the
+characters that people this book, and which give to it any value it may possess.</p>
+
+<p>For obvious reasons, I have been obliged to give fictitious names to
+factories and shops in which I worked; and I have, in most cases,
+substituted for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> the names of the streets where the factories were
+located the names of streets of like character.</p>
+
+<p>The physical conditions, the sordid wretchedness of factory and
+workshop, of boarding-and lodging-house, I have not in any wise overstated.</p>
+
+<p>As to moral conditions, I have not been in every instance so
+scrupulously truthful&mdash;that is, I have not told all the truth. For it is
+a truth which only too often will not bear even the suggestion of
+telling. Only in two or three instances&mdash;for example, in my account of
+Henrietta Manners&mdash;have I ventured to hint definitely at anything
+pertaining to the shame and iniquity underlying a discouragingly large
+part of the work-girls' world. In my magazine articles I was obliged to
+leave out all reference to this tabooed topic. The attitude of the
+public, especially the American public, toward this subject is a curious
+mixture of prudery and gallantry. It bridles at anything which impeaches
+the traditional honor and chastity of the working girl. The chivalry of
+American men&mdash;and my experience in workshop, store, and factory has
+proved to me how genuine and deep-rooted that chivalry is&mdash;combined with
+our inherent spirit of democracy, is responsible for the placing of the
+work-girl, as a class, in a light as false and ridiculous as that in
+which Don Quixote<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> was wont to view the charms of his swineherd lady,
+Dulcinea. In the main, our notions of the woman who toils do more credit
+to our sentiments and to the impulses of our hearts than they do credit
+to our heads or to any serious desires we may cherish for her welfare.
+She has become, and is becoming more and more, the object of such an
+amount of sentimentality on the part of philanthropists, sociological
+investigators, labor agitators, and yellow journals&mdash;and a goodly share
+of journalism that prides itself upon not being yellow&mdash;that the real
+work-girl has been quite lost sight of. Her name suggests, according to
+their imaginations, a proud, independent, self-reliant, efficient young
+woman&mdash;a young woman who works for her living and is glad of it. One
+hardly dares criticize her, unless, indeed, it be to lecture her for an
+ever-increasing independence of her natural male protectors and an
+alleged aversion to babies.</p>
+
+<p>That we should cling so tenaciously to this ideal is to our honor and
+glory. But fine words butter no parsnips; nor do our fine idealizations
+serve to reduce the quota which the working-girl ranks contribute to
+disreputable houses and vicious resorts. The factories, the workshops,
+and to some extent the stores, of the kind that I have worked in at
+least,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> are recruiting-grounds for the Tenderloin and the "red light"
+districts. The Springers and the "Pearl Laundries" send annually a large
+consignment of delinquents to their various and logical destinations. It
+is rare indeed that one finds a female delinquent who has not been in
+the beginning a working girl. For, sad and terrible though it be, the
+truth is that the majority of "unfortunates," whether of the
+specifically criminal or of the prostitute class, are what they are, not
+because they are inherently vicious, but <i>because they were failures as
+workers and as wage-earners</i>. They were failures as such, primarily, for
+no other reason than that they did not like to work. And they did not
+like to work, not because they are lazy&mdash;they are anything but lazy, as
+a rule&mdash;but <i>because they did not know how to work</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Few girls know how to work when they undertake the first job, whether
+that job be making paper boxes, seaming corset-covers, or taking
+shorthand dictation. Nor by the term, "knowing how to work," do I mean,
+necessarily, lack of experience. One may have had no experience whatever
+in any line of work, yet one may know <i>how</i> to work&mdash;may understand the
+general principles of intelligent labor. These general principles a girl
+may learn equally well by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> means of a normal-school training or through
+familiarity with, and participation in, the domestic labor of a
+well-organized household. The working girl in a great city like New York
+does not have the advantage of either form of training. Her education,
+even at the best, is meager, and of housework she knows less than
+nothing. If she is city-born, it is safe to assume that she has never
+been taught how to sweep a room properly, nor how to cook the simplest
+meal wholesomely, nor how to make a garment that she would be willing to
+wear. She usually buys all her cheap finery at a cheap store, and such
+style and taste as she displays is "ready made."</p>
+
+<p>Not having learned to work, either at school or at home, she goes to the
+factory, to the workshop, or to the store, crude, incompetent, and,
+worst of all, with an instinctive antagonism toward her task. <i>She
+cannot work, and she does not work. She is simply "worked."</i> And there
+is all the difference in the world between "working" and "being worked."
+To work is a privilege and a boon to either man or woman, and, properly
+regulated, it ought to be a pleasure. To be worked is degrading. To work
+is dignified and ennobling, for to work means the exercise of the mental
+quite as much as the physical self. But the average working girl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> puts
+neither heart nor mind into her labor; she is merely a machine, though
+the comparison is a libel upon the functions of first-class machinery.</p>
+
+<p>The harsh truth is that, hard as the working girl is "worked," and
+miserable as her remuneration is, she is usually paid quite as much as she is worth.</p>
+
+<p>For her incompetency she is not entirely to blame; rather is it a matter
+of heredity and environment. Being a girl, it is not natural to her to
+work systematically. The working woman is a new product; in this country
+she is hardly three generations old. As yet she is as new to the idea of
+what it really means to work as is the Afro-American citizen. The
+comparison may not be flattering to our vanity, but, after a reading of
+Booker Washington's various expositions of the industrial abilities of
+the negro, I cannot but be convinced that the white working woman is in
+a corresponding process of evolution, so far as her specific functions
+for labor have been developed.</p>
+
+<p>Conditions in the "Pearl," from the view-point of mere physical labor,
+were the most brutal in all my experience; but, from what I can learn,
+the "Pearl" is no worse than many other similar establishments. Young
+women will work in such places only as a last resort, for young women
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>cannot work long under conditions so detrimental to bodily health. The
+regular workers are old women&mdash;women like Mrs. Mooney and her cronies.
+The steady workers at the "Pearl" were, with the exception of the
+"queen," all old women. Every day saw the arrival of a new force of
+young hands who were bound to "play out" at the end of three or four
+days' apprenticeship, if not sooner. I played out completely: I didn't
+walk a step for a week after I went home with Minnie Plympton that
+Saturday night. Which was all in accord with Mrs. Mooney's prediction
+the first day: "You won't last long, mind ye; you young uns never do. If
+you ain't strong as an ox it gits in your back and off ye go to the
+'orspital; and if you're not able to stand the drivin', and thinks
+you're good-lookin', off you goes to the bad, sooner 'n stay here."</p>
+
+<p>I would like to dwell for a moment upon the character and personality of
+her whom I have more than once referred to as the "queen." The queen had
+worked, I was told, for seven years in the laundry, and she was, as I
+saw and knew her in those days, as fresh as the proverbial daisy. She
+seemed the very embodiment of blithesome happiness. In the chapter
+dealing with the laundry I had occasion to speak of her voluptuous
+beauty. Her long years of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> hard labor&mdash;and she labored harder than any
+one else there&mdash;seemed to have wrought no effect upon her handsome,
+nerveless body. Her lovely eyes, her hair, her dazzling complexion and
+perfect features, were all worthy the reputation of a stage beauty. She
+was kind; in her rough, uncouth way, she was kind to everybody&mdash;so kind,
+in fact, that she was generally popular, though envied as enjoying the
+boss's favor. And, as may be imagined, her influence, during those seven
+years, upon the underfed, underpaid, ignorant, unskilled green hands who
+streamed into the "Pearl" every morning must have been endless for evil.</p>
+
+<p>On the subject of morality I am constrained to express myself with
+apparent diffidence, lest I be misinterpreted and charged with vilifying
+the class to which I once belonged. And yet behind my diffidence of
+expression I must confess to a very honest and uncompromising belief,
+founded upon my own knowledge and observation, that the average working
+girl is even more poorly equipped for right living and right thinking
+than she is for intelligent industrial effort. One of the worst features
+of my experience was being obliged to hear the obscene stories which
+were exchanged at the work-table quite as a matter of course; and, if
+not a reflection of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> vicious minds, this is at least indicative of loose
+living and inherent vulgarity. The lewd joke, the abominable tale, is
+the rule, I assert positively, and not the exception, among the lower
+class of working girls with whom I toiled in those early months of my
+apprenticeship. The flower-manufactory in Broadway was the one glorious
+exception. I do not attempt to account for this exception to the general
+rule, unless it be explainable upon the logical theory that the skill
+necessary for the making of artificial flowers is found only in a vastly
+superior class of girls. The flower-girls I met at Rosenberg's were,
+without exception, wholesome-minded and pure-hearted. They knew how to
+cook, as they had ample opportunity of proving at our luncheons and
+dinners during those four busy, happy weeks. I never met factory-girls
+in any other line of employment who knew how to make a cup of tea or
+coffee that was fit to drink. The flower-girls gave every evidence of
+having come from homes which, humble though many of them must have been,
+were nevertheless well-ordered and clean. The girls I met in other
+places seemed never to have lived in homes at all.</p>
+
+<p>In the telling of the obscene story, Jew and Gentile, Catholic and
+Protestant, were equally guilty.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p><p>That the responsibility for these conditions of moral as well as
+physical wretchedness is fundamentally attributable to our present
+socio-economic system is a fact that has been stated so often before,
+and by writers who by right of specialized knowledge and scientific
+training are so much better equipped to discuss social economics than I
+may ever hope to be, that I need not repeat the axiom here. Nor would it
+be any more becoming for me to enter into any discussion of the various
+theories upon which the economists and the social reformers base their
+various projects for the reconstruction of the present system.
+Personally I have a strong prejudice in favor of the trades-union. I
+believe that working women should awaken as quickly as possible to the
+advantages to be derived from organization of the industries in which
+they are employed. But I seem to be alone in my cherished desire. The
+women and girls I have worked with in New York do not view the
+trades-union as their more progressive and enlightened sisters of
+Chicago and the West generally choose to regard it. Chicago alone shows
+a roster of nearly forty thousand women and girls who are organized into
+unions of their own, officered by themselves and with their own feminine
+"walking delegates." I recently spent four weeks among these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>
+trades-unions, numbering thirty-five distinct women's organizations, and
+I found, everywhere I went, the same enthusiasm for, and the same
+superior degree of intelligence regarding, the aim and object of the organization idea.</p>
+
+<p>As for the working women of New York, they have so far refused to
+countenance the trades-union. New York has no woman's trades-union. A
+small percentage of women workers belong to labor organizations, it is
+true; but it is merely as auxiliaries to the men's unions, and where
+they work at trades that have been thoroughly organized for the benefit
+of the men workers. They belong to these unions always under protest,
+not of their own volition; because they are obliged to do so in order to
+be permitted to work at their trades in competition with men who are organized.</p>
+
+<p>For this reason, owing to the blindness of the workwoman to the benefits
+to be derived from organization,&mdash;and because, moreover, it has not yet
+been proved that the trades-union, carried to its logical conclusion, is
+likely to be a panacea for the industrial woes of the sex which does
+favor and support it&mdash;it seems to me rather idle to urge its wider
+adoption under the protest of those most vitally <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>concerned&mdash;the women
+workers themselves. The idea of organized labor will have to grow among
+the ranks of women workers just as the idea has grown into the
+consciousness of her father and brother.</p>
+
+<p>We have a great and crying need for two things&mdash;things which it is
+entirely within the power of a broad-minded philanthropy to supply. The
+most urgent of these needs is a very material and unpoetic one. We need
+a well-regulated system of boarding-and lodging-houses where we can live
+with decency upon the small wages we receive. We do not want any
+so-called "working girls' homes"&mdash;God forgive the euphemism!&mdash;which,
+while overcharging us for the miserable accommodations, at the same time
+would put us in the attitude of charity dependants. What the working
+girl needs is a cheap hotel or a system of hotels&mdash;for she needs a great
+many of them&mdash;designed something after the Mills Hotels for working-men.
+She also needs a system of well-regulated lodging-houses, such as are
+scattered all over the city for the benefit of men. My experience of the
+working girls' home in which I lived for many weeks, and from my
+observation and inquiries regarding a number of similar "homes" which I
+have since visited, justifies me in making a few <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>suggestions regarding
+the general plan and conduct of the ideal philanthropic scheme which I have in mind.</p>
+
+<p>First and most important, there must be no semblance of charity. Let the
+working girls' hotel and the working girls' lodging-house be not only
+self-supporting, but so built and conducted that they will pay a fair
+rate of interest upon the money invested. Otherwise they would fail of
+any truly philanthropic object.</p>
+
+<p>As to their conduct as institutions there should be no rules, no
+regulations which are not in full operation in the Waldorf-Astoria or
+the Hotel St. Regis. The curse of all such attempts in the past has been
+the insistence upon <i>coercive morality</i>. Make them not only
+non-sectarian, but non-religious. There is no more need of conducting a
+working girls' hotel or lodging-house in the name of God or under the
+auspices of religious sentiment than there is necessity for advertising
+the Martha Washington Hotel or any fashionable bachelor-apartment house
+as being under divine guidance.</p>
+
+<p>A clean room and three wholesomely cooked meals a day <i>can</i> be furnished
+to working girls at a price such as would make it possible for them to
+live honestly on the small wage of the factory and store.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> We do not ask
+for luxuries or dainties. We do not get them in the miserable, dark
+warrens where we are now obliged to sleep, and we do not get them at the
+unappetizing boarding-house tables where countless thousands of us find
+sustenance. I do not know&mdash;I suppose nobody does know&mdash;how many working
+girls in New York City live in lodging-and boarding-houses. But they are
+legion, and very few of them are contented with that life.</p>
+
+<p>The most important necessity of the model working woman's hotel or
+lodging-house would be, not a luxurious table, not a dainty
+sleeping-room, but a parlor! The number of young girls who go wrong in a
+great city like this for want of the various necessities of a parlor
+must make the angels in heaven weep. The houses where the poorly paid
+girl lives have no accommodations for the entertainment of her male
+friends. If the house is conducted with any respect for the conventions,
+the girl lodger must meet her young man on the "stoop" or on the street
+corner. As the courtship progresses, they must have recourse either to
+the benches of the public parks, provided the weather be favorable, or
+else to the light and warmth of the back room of a saloon. The average
+cheap lodging-house is usually conducted, however, with but scant
+regard<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> for the conventions, and the girl usually is forced to adopt the
+more convenient and, as it would seem to her, really more
+self-respecting habit of receiving her company in her room. And either
+one of these methods of courtship, it is evident, cannot but be in the
+end demoralizing and degrading to thoughtless young people, however
+innocent they may be of any deliberate wrong-doing. In the model
+lodging-house there should be perfect liberty of conduct and action on
+the part of guests&mdash;who will not be "inmates" in any sense of the word.
+Such guests should have perfect liberty to go and come when they please
+at any hour of the day or night; be permitted to see any person they
+choose to have come, without question or challenge, so long as the
+conventions of ordinary social life are complied with. Such an
+institution, conducted upon such a plan and managed so that it would
+make fair returns to its promoters, cannot fail to be welcomed; and
+would be of inestimable benefit as an uplifting and regenerative force
+with those for whom it is designed.</p>
+
+<p>The other need is for a greater interest in the workwoman's welfare on
+the part of the church, and an effort by that all-powerful institution
+to bring about some adjustment of her social and economic difficulties.
+I am old-fashioned enough to believe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> in the supreme efficacy of
+organized religion in relation to womanhood, and all that pertains to
+womanhood. I believe that, in our present state of social development,
+the church can do more for the working girl than any of the proposed
+measures based upon economic science or the purely ethical theory.
+Working women as a class are certainly not ripe for the trades-union, as
+I have already intimated; and the earnest people of the "settlements"
+are able to reach but a small part of the great army of women marching
+hopelessly on, ungeneraled, untrained, and, worst of all, uncaring.</p>
+
+<p>Few are they who, like Tolstoi, can gracefully stoop to conquer; and
+those who shall be ordained to revolutionize conditions will rise from
+the ranks, even as did Booker T. Washington. This, of course, is the
+ultimate object of settlement work: to prepare the leaven for the loaf.</p>
+
+<p>But a live and progressive church&mdash;a church imbued with the Christian
+spirit in the broadest and most liberal interpretation of the term&mdash;can
+do for us, and do it quickly and at once, more than all the college
+settlements and all the trades-unions that can be organized within the
+next ten years could hope to do. And for this reason: the church has all
+the machinery ready, set up and waiting only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> for the proper hand to put
+it in motion to this great end. The Christian church has a vast
+responsibility in the solution of all problems of the social order, and
+none of those problems is more grave or urgent than the one affecting
+the economic condition of the wage-earning woman. It is curious that the
+church, in this age, should choose to regard its primary function with
+such evident apathy. The first business of the church in the past was
+the adjustment of social difficulties. The gospel of Jesus Christ was
+pre&euml;minently a social gospel, and when the church ceases to be a social
+force it will have outlived its usefulness.</p>
+
+<p>There are those who believe that the church <i>has</i> outlived that primal
+usefulness. I do not believe so. For men, perhaps, it has; but not for
+women&mdash;certainly not for working women. We do not as a sex, we do not as
+a class, flatter ourselves that we have got along so far in race
+development that we have no further need of organized religion. In all
+my experience of meeting and talking, often becoming intimately
+acquainted, with girls and women of all sorts, I have never known one,
+however questionable, to whom the church was not, after all, held in
+respect as the one all-powerful human institution.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, unless they were Catholics, mighty few<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> went to church at all,
+and most of them were resentful, often bitter, toward the church and
+hostile toward all kinds of organized religion. They accused the church
+of not doing its duty toward them, and they declared that organized
+religion was a sham and a hypocrisy.</p>
+
+<p>The only activity exerted by the church in the direction indicated
+partakes too strongly of the eleemosynary nature to make it acceptable
+to any save the most degraded&mdash;the weak-chinned, flabby-natured horde of
+men and women who rally instinctively to the drum-taps of the
+street-corner Salvationist, or seek warmth and cheer on cold winter
+nights, and if possible more substantial benefits, from the missions and "church houses."</p>
+
+<p>I have no quarrel to pick with the Salvation Army, nor with the city
+missions, as institutions. Both have done too much good for that "ninety
+and nine" which the church forgets. But it is a pity that the work of
+the Salvation Army and of the city missions is sometimes relegated to
+the control of such incompetent and unworthy persons as Henrietta
+Manners and "Brother" Mason. Since my brief acquaintance with those
+aspiring reformers, I have investigated and found that both were
+prominent workers and "guides" in the respective <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>religious movements to
+which they claimed allegiance; I also found that there were other
+Henrietta Mannerses and not a few "Brother" Masons interested in the
+same good work. It is the part of charity and justice to assume that
+their superior officers were totally ignorant of their real characters.</p>
+
+<p>But why should these sacred duties be relegated to the Henrietta
+Mannerses and the "Brother" Masons? Are there not enough intelligent,
+conscientious Christian men and women among the churches who would
+consider it not only a duty, but a precious privilege, to carry the
+gospel of Jesus Christ into the dark places? It is not wise to set a
+thief to catch a thief, and it is worse than useless to encourage the
+weak, not to say the depraved, to carry the gospel to their kind.</p>
+
+<p>In the days when I could see no silver lining to the clouds I tried
+going to a Protestant church, but I recognized very shortly the
+alienation between it and me. Personally, I do not like to attend
+Salvation meetings or listen to the mission evangelists. So I ceased any
+pretension of going to church, thus allying myself with that great
+aggregation of non-church-going Protestant working women who have been
+forced into a resentful attitude against that which we should love and
+support. It is <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>encouraging, however, to find that the church itself
+has, at last, begun to heed our growing disaffection and alienation:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"The fact must be admitted that the wage-workers of this country
+are largely outside the churches. This breach has been steadily
+widening; conditions are worse now than they were ten years ago.
+One of the strongest reasons for this is the fact that the churches
+have not recognized so clearly as they ought the equities of this
+conflict. It is a grave failure. They ought never to have suffered
+such an alienation to occur between themselves and the people who
+constitute the very bone and sinew of our civilization," says a
+prominent preacher and reformer.</p>
+
+<p>"How can the Christian church clear herself of the charge that the
+very people who heard her Lord gladly turn in multitudes from her
+threshold? There is need of sober thought and deep humiliation,
+that this most grave social problem may find a solution which shall
+bring honor to the church and peace to society."<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Obviously the fundamental need of the worker of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> either sex is
+education. She needs to be educated, this work-girl. She does not need a
+fancy education; but she does need a good education, so that upon her
+entrance into the workshop she will be able to read and write and add up
+a column of figures correctly and with ease. This she seems not to be
+able to do under present conditions. And there are other things, even
+more important than the "three R's," which she should be taught. She
+should be taught how to work&mdash;how to work <i>intelligently</i>. She should be
+trained young in the fundamental race activities, in the natural human
+instinct for making something with the hands, or of doing something with
+the hands, and of taking an infinite pleasure in making it perfect, in doing it well.</p>
+
+<p>I have no technical knowledge of pedagogics; I must admit that. My
+criticism of the public-school system I base entirely upon the results
+as I have seen them in the workshops, the factories, and the store in
+which I worked. During this period I had opportunity for meeting many
+hundreds of girls and for becoming more or less acquainted with them
+all. Now, of all these I have not yet discovered one who had not at some
+time in her earlier childhood or girlhood attended a public school.
+Usually the girl had had at least five years' continuous schooling, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>
+often it was much more. But, great or small as the period of her tuition
+had been, I never met one whose knowledge of the simplest rudiments of
+learning was confident and precise. Spelling, geography, grammar,
+arithmetic, were never, with them, positive knowledge, but rather
+matters of chance and guess. Even the brightest girls showed a woeful
+ignorance of the "three R's." In only one thing did I find them
+universally well taught, and that was in handwriting. However badly
+spelled and ungrammatical their written language might be, it was
+invariably neatly and legibly&mdash;often beautifully&mdash;executed. But if these
+girls, these workmates of mine, learned to write clear and beautiful
+hands, why were they not able also to learn how to spell, why were they
+not able to learn the principles of grammar and the elementary knowledge
+of arithmetic as far at least as long division? That they did not have
+sufficient "apperceiving basis" I cannot believe, for they were
+generally bright and clever.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the public schools are already teaching manual training,
+and that kindergartens have enormously increased lately. These facts I
+know very well. I also know how much ignorance and senseless prejudice
+the pioneers of these educational reforms have had to overcome in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>introduction of the newer and better methods. The point I wish to make
+carries no slur upon the ideal which the best modern pedagogy is
+striving for; it is, on the contrary, an appeal for the support and
+furtherance of that ideal on the part of intelligent citizenship
+generally, and of conscientious parenthood particularly. I believe
+firmly in the kindergarten; I believe that the child, whether rich or
+poor, who goes to kindergarten in his tender years has a better chance
+in life, all else being equal, than the child who does not. I do not
+know how long the free kindergarten system has obtained to any degree in
+New York City, but I do know that I have as yet found only one working
+girl who has had the benefit of any such training in childhood. She was
+"Lame Lena" at Springer's box-factory; and in spite of her deformity,
+which made it difficult for her to walk across the floor, she was the
+quickest worker and made more money than any other girl in the shop.</p>
+
+<p>Tersely put, and quoting her own speech, the secret of her success was
+in "knowing how to kill two birds with one stone," and, again, "makin'
+of your cocoanut save your muscle." These formul&aelig; were more or less
+vague until further inquiry elicited the interesting fact that "lame
+Lena," had had in childhood the privilege of a kindergarten training in
+a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> class maintained by some church society when the free kindergarten
+was not so general as it is now.</p>
+
+<p>It is not unreasonable to suppose that had this lame girl's workmates
+enjoyed the privilege of the same elementary training, they might have
+shown an equal facility in the humble task of pasting and labeling and
+tissuing paper boxes. "Lame Lena" knew how to work; she knew how to
+husband every modicum of nervous energy in her frail, deformed body; and
+thus she was able to make up&mdash;more than make up&mdash;for her physical
+inferiority. "Lame Lena" brought to her sordid task a certain degree of
+organizing faculty; she did the various processes rhythmically and
+systematically, always with the idea in view of making one stroke of the
+arm or the hand do, if possible, a double or a triple duty. The other
+girls worked helter-skelter; running hither and thither; taking many
+needless journeys back and forth across the floor; hurrying when they
+were fresh to the task, dawdling when they were weary, but at all times
+working without method and without organization of the task in hand, and
+without that co&ouml;rdination of muscular and mental effort which the
+kindergarten might have taught them, just as it had certainly taught "Lame Lena."</p>
+
+<p>The free kindergarten movement is not yet old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> enough to begin to show
+its effects to any perceptible degree in the factory and workshop.
+Henrietta Manners and Ph&oelig;be Arlington and little Angelina were born
+too soon: they did not know the joy of the kindergarten; they did not
+know the delight of sitting in a little red chair in a great circle of
+other little red chairs filled with other little girls, each and all
+learning the rudimentary principles of work under the blissful delusion
+that they were at play. These joys have been reserved for their little
+sisters, who, sooner or later, will step into their vacant places in the
+box-factory. What was denied Angelina it is the blessed privilege of
+Angelina's baby to revel in.</p>
+
+<p>Angelina's baby&mdash;the little baby that she kept in the day-nursery when
+we worked together at Springer's&mdash;now goes to a free kindergarten. I
+happen to know this because not long ago I met Angelina. She did not
+recognize me&mdash;indeed, she had difficulty in recalling vaguely that I had
+worked with her once upon a time; for Angelina's memory, like that of a
+great majority of her hard-worked class, is very poor,&mdash;a fact I mention
+because it is very much to the point right here. My solicitous inquiry
+for the baby brought forth a burst of Latin enthusiasm as to the
+cunningness and sweetness of that incipient box-maker, who, Angelina
+informed me, goes to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>kindergarten in a free hack along with a crowd of
+other babies. But Angelina, bless her soul! is down on the kindergarten.
+She says, with a pout and a contemptuous shrug, "they don't teach you're
+kid nothing but nonsense, just cutting up little pieces of paper and
+singing fool songs and marching to music." Angelina admitted, however,
+that her <i>bambino</i> was supremely happy there,&mdash;so happy, in fact, that
+she hadn't the heart to take her away, even though she does know that it
+is all "tomfoolishness" the "kid" is being taught by a mistaken philanthropy.</p>
+
+<p>It is fair to suppose that in the factory and workshop of every
+description the kindergarten is bound to work incalculable results.
+Indeed, I sometimes wonder if the kindergarteners themselves can quite
+realize how well they are building&mdash;can fully comprehend the very great
+need in the working woman of the identical principles which they are so
+patiently and faithfully inculcating into the tender minds of these
+forlorn babies gathered up in the courts and alleys.</p>
+
+<p>Another important thing looking to the well-being of the working girl of
+the future would be the wide dissemination of a better literature than
+that with which she now regales herself. I have already<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> outlined at
+some length the literary tastes of my workmates at the box-factory. The
+example cited is typical of other factories and other workshops, and
+also of the department-store. A certain downtown section of New York
+City is monopolized by the publishers and binders of "yellow-backs,"
+which are turned out in bales and cart-loads daily. Girls fed upon such
+mental trash are bound to have distorted and false views of everything.
+There is a broad field awaiting some original-minded philanthropist who
+will try to counteract the maudlin yellow-back by putting in its place
+something wholesome and sweet and sane. Only, please, Mr. or Mrs.
+Philanthropist, don't let it be Shakspere, or Ruskin, or Walter Pater.
+Philanthropists have tried before to reform degraded literary tastes
+with heroic treatment, and they have failed every time.</p>
+
+<p>That is sometimes the trouble with the college-settlement folk. They
+forget that Shakspere, and Ruskin, and all the rest of the really true
+and great literary crew, are infinite bores to every-day people. I know
+personally, and love deeply and sincerely, a certain young woman&mdash;a
+settlement-worker&mdash;who for several years conducted an evening class in
+literature for some girl "pants-makers." She gave them all the classics
+in allopathic doses, she gave them copies of "A Crown of Wild Olive"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>
+and "The Ethics of the Dust," which they read dutifully, not because
+they liked the books, which were meaningless to their tired heads, but
+because they loved Miss &mdash;&mdash; and enjoyed the evenings spent with her at
+the settlement. But Miss &mdash;&mdash; did not succeed in supplanting their old
+favorites, which undoubtedly she could have done had she given them all
+the light, clean present-day romance they could possibly read. It is a
+curious fact that these girls will not read stories laid in the past,
+however full of excitement they may be. They like romance of the present
+day, stories which have to do with scenes and circumstances not too far
+removed from the real and the actual. All their trashy favorites have to
+do with the present, with heroes and heroines who live in New York City
+or Boston or Philadelphia; who go on excursions to Coney Island, to Long
+Branch, or to Delaware Water Gap; and who, when they die, are buried in
+Greenwood over in Brooklyn, or in Woodlawn up in Westchester County. In
+other words, any story, to absorb their interest, must cater to the very
+primitive feminine liking for identity. This liking, this passion, their
+own special authors have thoroughly comprehended, and keep it constantly
+in mind in the development of their plots.</p>
+
+<p>This taste for better literature could be helped<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> along immeasurably if
+still another original-minded philanthropist were to make it his
+business that no tenement baby should be without its "Mother Goose" and,
+a little later, its "Little Women," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "Robinson
+Crusoe," and all the other precious childhood favorites. As it is, the
+majority know nothing about them.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>But, after all, the greatest factor in the ultimate development of the
+working girl as a wage-earning unit&mdash;the most potent force for the
+adjustment of all the difficulties besetting her at every turn, and for
+the righting of all her wrongs, social, economic, or moral&mdash;will be the
+attitude which she herself assumes toward the dispassionate
+consideration of those difficulties to be adjusted, and of those wrongs to be righted.</p>
+
+<p>At the present time there is nobody so little concerned about herself
+and her condition as the working woman herself. Taking everything into
+consideration, and in spite of conditions which, to the observer viewing
+them at a distance great enough to get a perspective, seem
+irreconcilably harsh and bitter&mdash;in the face of all this, one must
+characterize the working woman as a contented, if not a happy woman.
+That is the great trouble that will have to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> be faced in any effort to
+alleviate her condition. She is too contented, too happy, too patient.
+But not wholesomely so. Hers is a contentment, a happiness, a patience
+founded, not in normal good health and the joy of living and working,
+but in apathy. Her lot is hard, but she has grown used to it; for, being
+a woman, she is patient and long-suffering. She does not entirely
+realize the tragedy of it all, and what it means to herself, or to her
+children perhaps yet to be born.</p>
+
+<p>In the happy future, the working girl will no longer be content to be
+merely "worked." Then she will have learned to work. She will have
+learned to work intelligently, and, working thus, she will begin to
+think&mdash;to think about herself and all those things which most vitally
+concern her as a woman and as a wage-earner. And then, you may depend
+upon it, she will settle the question to please herself, and she will
+settle it in the right way.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTE:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> "The Church and Social Problems," by Rev. Washington
+Gladden, D.D. ("International Quarterly.")</p></div></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Long Day, by Dorothy Richardson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Long Day
+       The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself
+
+
+Author: Dorothy Richardson
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 29, 2010  [eBook #31118]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONG DAY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Martin Pettit, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustration.
+      See 31118-h.htm or 31118-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31118/31118-h/31118-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31118/31118-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LONG DAY
+
+The Story of a New York Working Girl * * As Told by Herself
+
+[Illustration: Logo]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+The Century Co.
+1905
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Copyright, 1905, by The Century Co.
+
+Published October, 1905
+
+The Devinne Press
+
+
+
+
+TO MY THREE "LADY-FRIENDS"
+
+Happy, fortunate Minnie; Bessie, of gentle memory; and that other,
+silent figure in the tragedy of Failure, the long-lost, erring Eunice,
+with the hope that, if she still lives, her eye may chance to fall upon
+this page, and reading the message of this book, she may heed.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                 PAGE
+
+   I IN WHICH I ARRIVE IN NEW YORK                         3
+
+  II IN WHICH I START OUT IN QUEST OF WORK                16
+
+ III I TRY "LIGHT" HOUSEKEEPING IN A FOURTEENTH-STREET
+       LODGING-HOUSE                                      27
+
+  IV WHEREIN FATE BRINGS ME GOOD FORTUNE IN ONE HAND
+       AND DISASTER IN THE OTHER                          44
+
+   V IN WHICH I AM "LEARNED" BY PHOEBE IN THE ART
+       OF BOX-MAKING                                      58
+
+  VI IN WHICH PHOEBE AND MRS. SMITH HOLD FORTH UPON
+       MUSIC AND LITERATURE                               75
+
+ VII IN WHICH I ACQUIRE A STORY-BOOK NAME AND MAKE
+       THE ACQUAINTANCE OF MISS HENRIETTA MANNERS         92
+
+VIII WHEREIN I WALK THROUGH DARK AND DEVIOUS WAYS
+       WITH HENRIETTA MANNERS                            108
+
+  IX INTRODUCING HENRIETTA'S "SPECIAL GENTLEMAN-FRIEND"  123
+
+   X IN WHICH I FIND MYSELF A HOMELESS WANDERER
+       IN THE NIGHT                                      142
+
+  XI I BECOME AN "INMATE" OF A HOME FOR WORKING GIRLS    151
+
+ XII IN WHICH I SPEND A HAPPY FOUR WEEKS MAKING
+       ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS                                180
+
+XIII THREE "LADY-FRIENDS," AND THE ADVENTURES THAT
+       BEFALL THEM                                       197
+
+ XIV IN WHICH A TRAGIC FATE OVERTAKES MY "LADY-FRIENDS"  215
+
+  XV I BECOME A "SHAKER" IN A STEAM-LAUNDRY              229
+
+ XVI IN WHICH IT IS PROVED TO ME THAT THE DARKEST HOUR
+  COMES JUST BEFORE THE DAWN                             249
+
+     EPILOGUE                                            266
+
+
+
+
+THE LONG DAY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+IN WHICH I ARRIVE IN NEW YORK
+
+
+The rain was falling in great gray blobs upon the skylight of the little
+room in which I opened my eyes on that February morning whence dates the
+chronological beginning of this autobiography. The jangle of a bell had
+awakened me, and its harsh, discordant echoes were still trembling upon
+the chill gloom of the daybreak. Lying there, I wondered whether I had
+really heard a bell ringing, or had only dreamed it. Everything about me
+was so strange, so painfully new. Never before had I waked to find
+myself in that dreary, windowless little room, and never before had I
+lain in that narrow, unfriendly bed.
+
+Staring hard at the streaming skylight, I tried to think, to recall some
+one of the circumstances that might possibly account for my having
+entered that room and for my having laid me down on that cot. When? and
+how? and why? How inexplicable it all was in those first dazed moments
+after that rude awakening! And then, as the fantasies of a dream
+gradually assume a certain vague order in the waking recollection, there
+came to me a confused consciousness of the events of the preceding
+twenty-four hours--the long journey and the weariness of it; the
+interminable frieze of flying landscape, with its dreary, snow-covered
+stretches blurred with black towns; the shriek of the locomotive as it
+plunged through the darkness; the tolling of ferry-bells, and then, at
+last, the slow sailing over a black river toward and into a giant city
+that hung splendid upon the purple night, turret upon turret, and tower
+upon tower, their myriad lights burning side by side with the stars, a
+city such as the prophets saw in visions, a city such as dreamy
+childhood conjures up in the muster of summer clouds at sunset.
+
+Suddenly out of this chaotic recollection of unearthly splendors came
+the memory, sharp and pinching, of a new-made grave on a wind-swept hill
+in western Pennsylvania. With equal suddenness, too, the fugue of
+thundering locomotives, and shrieking whistles, and sad, sweet tollings
+of ferry-bells massed itself into the clangorous music of a terrifying
+monody--"WORK OR STARVE, WORK OR STARVE!"
+
+And then I remembered! An unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl
+of eighteen, utterly alone in the world, I was a stranger in a strange
+city which I had not yet so much as seen by daylight. I was a waif and a
+stray in the mighty city of New York. Here I had come to live and to
+toil--out of the placid monotony of a country town into the storm and
+stress of the wide, wide, workaday world. Very wide awake now, I jumped
+out of bed upon the cold oil-cloth and touched a match to the pile of
+paper and kindling-wood in the small stove. There was a little puddle of
+water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip in
+falling had brushed against the sleeve of my shirt-waist and soaked into
+the soles of my only pair of shoes. I dressed as quickly as the cold and
+my sodden garments permitted. On the washstand I found a small tin ewer
+and a small tin basin to match, and I dabbed myself gingerly in the
+cold, stale water.
+
+Another jangle of the harsh bell, and I went down dark stairs to the
+basement and to breakfast, wondering if I should be able to recognize
+Miss Jamison; for I had caught but a glimpse of my new landlady on my
+arrival the previous midnight. Wrapped in a faded French flannel
+kimono, her face smeared with cold cream, her hair done up in curling
+"kids," she had met and arranged terms with me on the landing in front
+of her bedroom door as the housemaid conducted me aloft. Making due
+allowance for the youth-and-beauty-destroying effects of the kimono,
+curling "kids," and cold cream, and substituting in their stead a snug
+corset, an undulated pompadour, and a powdered countenance,
+respectively, I knew about what to look for in the daylight Miss
+Jamison. A short, plump, blonde lady in the middle forties, I predicted
+to myself. The secretary of the Young Women's Christian Association, to
+which I had written some weeks before for information as to respectable
+and cheap boarding-houses, had responded with a number of names and
+addresses, among them that of Miss Elmira Jamison, "a lady of very high
+Christian ideals."
+
+Miss Jamison was no disappointment. She fulfilled perfectly all my
+preconceived notions of what she would look like when properly attired.
+Spying me the moment I got inside the dining-room door, she immediately
+pounced upon me and hurried me off to a seat, when a girl in a dirty
+white apron began to unload off a tray a clatter of small dishes under
+my nose, while another servant tossed a wet, warm napkin upon my plate.
+My breakfast consisted of heterogeneous little dabs of things in the
+collection of dishes, and which I ate with not the greatest relish in
+the world.
+
+There were several score of breakfasters in the two big rooms, which
+seemed to occupy the entire basement floor. They ate at little tables
+set uncomfortably close together. Gradually my general observations
+narrowed down to the people at my own table. I noticed a young man
+opposite who wore eye-glasses and a carefully brushed beard; an old
+lady, with a cataract in her left eye, who sat at the far end of the
+table; a little fidgety, stupid-looking, and very ugly woman who sat
+next the bearded young man; and a young girl, with dancing, roguish
+black eyes, who sat beside me. The bearded young man talked at a great
+rate, and judging from the cackling laughter of the fidgety woman and
+the intensely interested expression of the cataracted lady, the subject
+was one of absorbing interest.
+
+Gradually I discovered that the topic of discourse was none other than
+our common hostess and landlady; and gradually, too, I found myself
+listening to the history of Miss Elmira Jamison's career as a purveyor
+of bed and board to impecunious and homeless mortals.
+
+Five years ago Miss Jamison had come into this shabby though eminently
+respectable neighborhood, and opened a small boarding-house in a
+neighboring street. She had come from some up-State country town, and
+her bureaus and bedsteads were barely enough to furnish the small,
+old-fashioned house which she took for a term of years. Miss Jamison was
+a genius--a genius of the type peculiar to the age in which we live. She
+wasn't the "slob" that she looked. The epithet is not mine, but that of
+the young gentleman to whom I am indebted for this information. No,
+indeed; Miss Jamison was anything but a "slob," as one soon found out
+who had occasion to deal with her very long. A shrewd, exacting,
+penny-for-penny and dollar-for-dollar business woman was concealed under
+the mask of her good-natured face and air of motherly solicitude. Miss
+Jamison, at the very start-out of her career, was inspired to call her
+little "snide" boarding-house after the founder of the particular creed
+professed by the congregation of the neighboring church. The result was
+that "The Calvin" immediately became filled with homeless Presbyterians,
+or the homeless friends and acquaintances of Presbyterians. They not
+only filled her house, but they overflowed, and to preserve the overflow
+Miss Jamison rented the adjoining house.
+
+Miss Jamison was now a successful boarding-house keeper on a scale
+large enough to have satisfied the aspirations of a less clever woman.
+But she longed for other denominations to feed and house. Of the
+assortment that offered themselves, she chose the Methodists next, and
+soon had several flourishing houses running under the pious appellation
+"Wesley," which name, memorialized in large black letters on a brass
+sign, soon became a veritable magnet to board-seeking Methodism.
+
+The third and last venture of the energetic lady, and the one from which
+she was to derive her largest percentage of revenue, was the
+establishment of the place of which I had so recently become an inmate.
+Of all three of Miss Jamison's boarding-houses, this was the largest and
+withal the cheapest and most democratic: in which characteristics it but
+partook of the nature of the particular sort of church-going public it
+wished to attract, which was none other than the heterodox element which
+flocked in vast numbers to All People's church. The All People's edifice
+was a big, unsightly brick building. It had been originally designed for
+a roller-skating rink.
+
+All People's, as the church was colloquially named, was one of the most
+popular places of worship in the city. Every Sunday, both at morning and
+evening services, the big rink was packed to the doors with people who
+were attracted quite as much by the good music as they were by the
+popular preaching of the very popular divine. A large percentage of this
+great congregation was recruited from the transient element of
+population which lives in lodgings and boarding-houses. From its
+democracy and lack of all ceremony, it was a church which appealed
+particularly to those who were without ties or affiliations. Into this
+sanctuary the lonely young man (or girl) of a church-going temperament
+was almost sure to drift sooner or later if his probationary period of
+strangerhood happened to fall in this section of the city.
+
+The clever Miss Jamison put a sign bearing the legend, "All People's,"
+on each of the doors of six houses, opposite the church, which she
+acquired one by one as her business increased. The homeless and lonely
+who came to All People's for spiritual refreshment, or to gratify their
+curiosity, remained to patronize Miss Jamison's "special Sunday"
+thirty-five-cent table d'hote, served in the basement of one house; or
+bought a meal-ticket for four dollars, which entitled them to twenty-one
+meals served in the basement of another of the houses; or for the sum of
+five dollars and upward insured themselves the privilege of a week's
+lodging and three meals a day served in still another of the basements.
+
+Such is the history of Miss Jamison as detailed at the breakfast-table
+that Sunday morning.
+
+I went out for a walk late in the afternoon, and wandered about,
+homesick and lonely. When I returned dinner was over and the dining-room
+almost deserted, only a few remaining to gossip over their dessert and
+coffee. At my table all had gone save the young girl with the dark eyes,
+who, I felt instinctively, was a very nice and agreeable girl. As I
+approached the table, she raised her eyes from the book she was reading
+and gave me a diffident little bow, when, seeing I was so glad to
+respond to it, she immediately smiled in a friendly way.
+
+From the glimpse I had caught of her during the morning meal, I had
+thought her very pretty in a smart, stiffly starched, mannish-looking
+shirt-waist. That night she looked even prettier, clad in a
+close-fitting cloth gown of dark wine-color. I noticed, too, as I sat
+down beside her, that she was an unusually big woman.
+
+"How do you like the boarding-house by this time?" she asked, with an
+encouraging smile, to which I responded as approvingly as I could in the
+remembrance of the cheerless hall bedroom far above, and in the
+presence of the unappetizing dinner spread before me.
+
+"Well, I think it's rotten, if you'll excuse my French," laughed Miss
+Plympton, as she cut a square of butter off the common dish and passed
+it to me. "And I guess you think so, too, only you're too polite to
+roast the grub like the rest of us do. But you'll get over that in time.
+I was just the same way when I first begun living in boarding-houses,
+but I've got bravely over that now.
+
+"I've been here just a little over a week myself," she went on in her
+frank and engaging manner. "I saw you this morning, and I just knew how
+you felt. I thought I'd die of homesickness when I came. Not a soul
+spoke to me for four days. Not that anybody would want to particularly
+get acquainted with these cattle, only I'm one of the sort that has got
+to have somebody to speak to. So this morning I said to myself, when I
+saw you, that I'd put on nerve and up and speak to you even if you did
+turn me down. And that's why I waited for you to-night."
+
+I responded that I was glad she had been so informal; absence of
+formality being the meaning I interpreted from her slang, which was much
+more up-to-date and much more vigorous than that to which I had been
+accustomed in the speech of a small country village. As I ate, we
+talked. We talked a little about a great many things in which we were
+not at all interested, and a very great deal about ourselves and the
+hazards of fortune which had brought our lives together and crossed them
+thus at Miss Jamison's supper-table,--subjects into which we entered
+with all the zest and happy egotism of youth. Of this egotism I had the
+greater preponderance, probably because of my three or four years' less
+experience of life. Before we rose from the table I had told Miss
+Plympton the story of my life as it had been lived thus far.
+
+Of her own story, all I knew was that she was a Westerner, that she had
+worked a while in Chicago, and had come to New York on a mission similar
+to my own--to look for a job. We went together to her room, which was as
+small and shabby as my own, and a few minutes later we were sitting
+round the little Jenny Lind stove, listening to the pleasant crackle of
+the freshly kindled fire. Both were silent for a few minutes. Then my
+new friend spoke.
+
+"What does that put you in mind of?" she asked slowly.
+
+"You mean the crackle of the kindling-wood and the snap of the coal as
+the flames begin to lick it?" I asked.
+
+"U-m-m, yes; the crackle of the wood and the snap of the coal," said the
+girl in a dreamy tone.
+
+"Home!" I cried, quick as a flash. "It makes me think of home--of the
+home I used to have," and my eyes blurred.
+
+"Here, too! Home!" she replied softly. "Funny, isn't it, that we have so
+many ideas exactly alike? But I suppose that's because we were both
+brought up in the country."
+
+"In the country!" I exclaimed in surprise. "I thought you were from
+Chicago."
+
+"Oh, no; I'm from the country. I didn't go to Chicago till I was twenty.
+I lived all my life on a farm in Iowa, till I went up to get a job in
+Chicago after my father died and I was all alone in the world. We lived
+in the very wildest part of the State--in the part they call the 'Big
+Woods.' Oh, I know all about frontier life. And there's hardly any kind
+of 'roughing it' that I haven't done. I was born to it."
+
+She laughed, opening the stove door, for the elbow of the pipe was now
+red-hot and threatening conflagration to the thin board partition
+behind, which divided the little room from that of the next lodger.
+
+A loud thump upon the board partition startled us. We listened for a
+few moments,--at first with alarm,--and then realized that the noise was
+only the protest of a sleepy boarder.
+
+Presently, as we continued to talk, the banging of a shoe-heel on the
+wall grew more insistent. We heard doors opening along the hall, and a
+high, raucous voice invoked quiet in none too polite phrase. So I said,
+"Good night," in a whisper and tiptoed to my own door.
+
+Thus began my acquaintance with Minnie Plympton--an acquaintance which,
+ripening later into a warm friendship, was to have an incalculable
+influence upon my life.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+IN WHICH I START OUT IN QUEST OF WORK
+
+
+When I woke up the next morning it was to find a weight of homesickness
+lying heavy upon my heart--homesickness for something which, alas! no
+longer existed save in memory. Then I remembered the girl on the floor
+below, and soon I was dressing with a light heart, eager to hurry down
+to breakfast. I was somewhat disappointed to find that she had eaten her
+breakfast and gone. I went out upon the stoop, hailed a newsboy, and
+sought my skylight bedroom.
+
+It was with a hope born of youth and inexperience that I now gave
+systematic attention to "HELP WANTED--Female." I will confess that at
+first I was ambitious to do only what I chose to esteem "lady-like"
+employment. I had taught one winter in the village school back home, and
+my pride and intelligence naturally prompted me to a desire to do
+something in which I could use my head, my tongue, my wits--anything,
+in fact, rather than my hands. The advertisements I answered all held
+out inducements of genteel or semi-genteel nature--ladies' companions;
+young women to read aloud to blind gentlemen and to invalids; assistants
+in doctors' and dentists' offices, and for the reception-room of
+photograph galleries. All of them requested answers in "own handwriting,
+by mail only." I replied to scores of such with no success.
+
+There was also another kind of illusive advertisement which I answered
+in prodigal numbers in the greenness of these early days. These were
+those deceitfully worded requests for "bright, intelligent ladies--no
+canvassing." And not less prodigal were the returns I got. They came in
+avalanches by every mail, from patent-medicine concerns,
+subscription-book publishers, novelty manufacturers--all in search of
+canvassers to peddle their trash.
+
+I might have saved much superfluous effort, and saved myself many
+postage-stamps, had I been fortunate enough to have had the advice of
+Miss Plympton throughout this first week. But Miss Plympton had gone
+away for several days. I had not seen her since we had parted on Sunday
+night; but Monday evening, when I went to the table, I found a hasty
+note saying she had gone out of town to see about a job, and would see
+me later. That was all. I found myself longing for her more and more as
+the week wore away.
+
+Meanwhile, however, I did not allow the sentiment of an interrupted
+acquaintance to interfere with my quest for a job, nor did I sit idle in
+Miss Jamison's boarding-house waiting for replies. I had only a few
+dollars in the world, and on the other side of those few dollars I saw
+starvation staring me in the face unless I found work very soon. I
+planned my search for work as systematically as I might have conducted a
+house-cleaning. As soon as each day's grist of "wants" was sifted and a
+certain quota disposed of by letter, I set out to make personal
+applications to such as required it. This I found to be an even more
+discouraging business than the epistolary process, as it was bitterly
+cold and the streets were filled with slush and snow. The distances were
+interminable, and each day found my little hoard dwindling away with
+frightful rapidity into innumerable car-fares and frequent cups of
+coffee at wayside lunch-counters. I traveled over miles and miles of
+territory, by trolley-car, by elevated train and ferry-boat, to
+Brooklyn, to Harlem, to Jersey City and Newark, only to reach my
+destination cold and hungry, and to be interviewed by a seedy man with
+a patent stove-lifter, a shirt-waist belt, a contrivance for holding up
+a lady's train, or a new-fangled mop--anything, everything that a
+persistent agent might sell to the spendthrift wife of an American
+workingman.
+
+By the end of the week I was obliged to hunt for another boarding-house
+as well as continue the search for work. My little bedroom under the
+skylight, and three meals per day of none too plentiful and wretchedly
+cooked food, required the deposit of five dollars a week in advance.
+With but a few dollars left in my purse, and the prospect of work still
+far off, nothing in the world seemed so desirable as that I might be
+able to pass the remainder of my days in Miss Jamison's house, and that
+I might be able to breakfast indefinitely in her dark basement
+dining-room.
+
+Sunday morning came around again. I had been a week in the city, and was
+apparently no nearer to earning a livelihood than the day I started out.
+I had gained a little experience, but it had been at the cost of nearly
+five precious dollars, all spent in street-car fare and postage-stamps;
+of miles and miles of walking through muddy, slushy streets; and at the
+sacrifice of my noon lunch, which I could have had done up for me at the
+boarding-house without extra charge, but which my silly vanity did not
+allow me to carry around under my arm.
+
+Sunday morning again, and still no Miss Plympton. She was under
+discussion when I reached the breakfast-table. The lady with the
+cataract and her friend were speaking of how well she always dressed,
+and one of them wondered how she managed to do it, since she had no
+visible means of support. Dr. Perkins didn't seem to relish the turn the
+conversation had taken, and suddenly he fell completely out of it. But
+the gossips clacked on regardless, until they were brought to a
+standstill by a peremptory exclamation from the end of the table.
+
+"Excuse me," spoke up the doctor, dryly, "but I'll have to ask you to
+change the subject. You are talking about a young lady of whom you know
+absolutely nothing!"
+
+The scandal-mongers finished breakfast in silence and soon shuffled away
+in their bedroom slippers.
+
+"Old cats!" said the doctor, energetically. "Boarding-house life breeds
+them. A boarding-house is no place for anybody. It perverts all the
+natural instincts, mental, moral, and physical. You'd hardly believe it,
+but I've lived in boarding-houses so long that I can't digest really
+wholesome food any more."
+
+When at last we rose to go, he handed me a card upon which I later read
+this astonishing inscription in heavy black type: "PAINLESS PERKINS";
+and, in smaller type underneath, the information that the extracting or
+filling of molars; crown and bridge work; or the fitting of artificial
+teeth, would be done by Painless Perkins in a "Particularly Pleasing
+Way," and that he was "Predisposed to Popular Prices."
+
+With no books to read, and no advertisements to answer, and no friend
+with whom to gossip, the day stretched before me a weary, dreary waste,
+when I happened to think of the church across the way, something of the
+history of which I had heard from Painless Perkins. And so I joined the
+crowd of strangers who were pouring into the doors of "All People's" to
+the music of a sweet-toned bell.
+
+I was there early, but the auditorium was packed, and I was ushered to a
+camp-chair in the aisle. The crowd was not suggestive of fashionable New
+York, though there were present many fine-looking, well-groomed men and
+women. But nearly everybody was neatly and decently if not well dressed.
+Many of the faces looked as sad and lonely as I felt. They appeared to
+be strangers--homeless wanderers who had come here to church not so much
+for worship as to come in touch with human beings. I was too tired, too
+discouraged even to hear what the earnest-voiced preacher said. The two
+girls sitting directly in front of me listened intently, as they passed
+a little bag of peppermints back and forth, and I envied them the
+friendship which that furtive bag of peppermints betokened. If I had had
+any prospect of getting a job the following week, I too could have
+listened to the preacher. As it was, my ears were attuned only to the
+terrifying refrain which had haunted me all week: "WORK OR STARVE, WORK
+OR STARVE!" After a while I tried to rouse myself and to take in the
+sermon which was holding the great congregation breathless. It was about
+the Good Samaritan. I heard a few sentences. Then the preacher's voice
+was lost once more in that insistent refrain.
+
+Dinner at noon and supper in the evening in the dark house across the
+street, and still my friend was absent. The scandal-mongers were as busy
+as ever, for Painless Perkins was away.
+
+Monday morning I made my way eastward on foot, across Union Square. The
+snow had been falling all night and was still sifting down in big,
+flowery flakes. The trees under their soft, feathery burdens looked like
+those that grow only in a child's picture-book. The slat-benches were
+covered with soft white blankets that were as yet undisturbed, for the
+habitual bench tramp was not abroad so early in the morning.
+
+I was up extraordinarily early, as I started out on a double search. The
+first item on my list--"Board and room, good neighborhood, $3.00"--took
+me south across Fourteenth Street, choked and congested with the morning
+traffic. The pavements were filled with hurrying crowds--factory-hands,
+mill-girls, mechanics--the vanguard of the great labor army. I hunted
+for Mrs. McGinniss's residence in a street which pays little attention
+to the formality of numbers. An interview with a milk-cart driver
+brought the discouraging news that I might find it somewhere between
+First and Second avenues, and I hurried on down the street, which
+stretched away and dipped in the far distance under the framework of the
+elevated railroad. The stoop-line on either side presented an
+interminable vista of small, squalid shops, meat-markets, and saloons.
+
+Wedged between a paper-box factory and a blacksmith's shop I found Mrs.
+McGinniss's number. It was a five-story red-brick tenement, like all the
+others that rise above the stoop-line of this poverty-stricken street. A
+soiled scrap of paper pasted beneath the button informed possible
+visitors that Mrs. McGinniss lived on the fifth floor, that her bell was
+out of order, and that one should "Push Guggenheim's."
+
+The Guggenheims responded with a click from above. I ascended a flight
+of dark stairs, at the top of which there was ranged an ambuscade of
+numerous small Guggenheims who had gushed out in their underdrawers and
+petticoats. Their mother, in curl-papers, gave explicit directions for
+my guidance upward.
+
+"Is this where Mrs. McGinniss lives?" I inquired of the dropsical
+slattern who responded to my rap.
+
+"I'm her."
+
+Mrs. McGinniss's manner was aggressive. Conscious of her bare, sodden
+arms and dripping gingham apron, she evidently supposed I had mistaken
+her for a laundress instead of the lady of her own house, and she showed
+her resentment by chilly reticence.
+
+"I don't run no boarding-house, and I don't take just any trash that
+come along, either."
+
+I agreed that these were excellent qualities in a landlady, and then,
+somewhat mollified, she led the way through a steamy passage into a
+stuffy bedroom. It had one window, looking out into an air-shaft filled
+with lines of fluttering garments and a network of fire-escapes. A
+slat-bed, a bureau, a washstand with a noseless pitcher, and a
+much-spotted Brussels carpet completed the furnishings, and out of all
+exuded ancient odors of boiled cabbage and soap-suds.
+
+"There's one thing, though, I won't stand for, and that's cigarettes.
+I've had the last girl in my house that smokes cigarettes I'm going to
+have. Look at that nice carpet! Look at it! All burned full of holes
+where that trollop throwed her matches."
+
+I hurried away, with a polite promise to consider the McGinniss
+accommodations.
+
+The abode of Mrs. Cunningham was but a few blocks away. Mrs. Cunningham
+did not live in a flat, but in the comparative gentility of "up-stairs
+rooms" over a gaudy undertaking establishment. She proved to be an Irish
+lady with a gin-laden breath. Her eyes were blue and bleared, and looked
+in kindly fashion through a pair of large-rimmed and much-mended
+spectacles, from which one of the glasses had totally disappeared. She
+was affable, and responded to my questions with almost maudlin
+tenderness, calling me "dearie" throughout the interview. Her little
+parlor was hung with chromo reproductions of great religious paintings,
+and the close atmosphere was redolent of the heavy perfume of lilies
+and stale tuberoses. Remarking the unusual prodigality of flowers, the
+good lady explained that the undertaker beneath was in the habit of
+showing his esteem by the daily tender of such funeral decorations as
+had served their purpose. Mrs. Cunningham's accommodations at four
+dollars per week were beyond my purse, however; but, as she was willing
+to talk all day, my exit was made with difficulty.
+
+The remainder of that day and a good part of the days that followed were
+spent in interviewing all manner of landladies, most of whom, like Mrs.
+McGinniss's bell, were disordered physically or mentally. Heartsick, I
+decided by Saturday to take blind chances with the janitress of a
+Fourteenth-street lodging-house. She had a cleft palate, and all I could
+understand of her mutilated talk was that the room would be one dollar a
+week with "light-housekeeping" privileges thrown in. I had either to pay
+Miss Jamison another five dollars that next morning or take chances
+here. I took the hazard, paid the necessary one dollar to the more or
+less inarticulate woman, and went back to Miss Jamison's to get my
+baggage and to eat the one dinner that was still due me--not forgetting
+to leave a little note for the still absent Minnie Plympton, giving her
+my new address.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+I TRY "LIGHT" HOUSEKEEPING IN A FOURTEENTH-STREET LODGING-HOUSE
+
+
+Bedtime found me thoroughly settled in my new quarters, and myself in
+quite an optimistic frame of mind as I drew close to the most fearfully
+and wonderfully mutilated little cook-stove that ever cheered the heart
+of a lonely Fourteenth-street "light housekeeper." In the red-hot glow
+of its presence, and with the inspiring example of courage and fortitude
+which it presented, how could I have felt otherwise than optimistic? It
+was such a tiny mite of a stove, and it seemed to have had such a world
+of misfortune and bad luck! There was something whimsically, almost
+pathetically, human about it. This, it so pleased my fancy to believe,
+was because of the sufferings it had borne. Its little body cracked and
+warped and rust-eaten, the isinglass lights in its door long since
+punched out by the ruthless poker, the door itself swung to on the
+broken hinge by a twisted nail--a brave, bright, merry little cripple
+of a stove, standing on short wooden legs. I made the interesting
+discovery that it was a stove of the feminine persuasion; "Little
+Lottie" was the name which I spelled out in the broken letters that it
+wore across its glowing heart. And straightway Little Lottie became more
+human than ever--poor Little Lottie, the one solitary bright and
+cheerful object within these four smoke-grimed walls which I had elected
+to make my home.
+
+Home! The tears started at the mere recollection of the word. The
+firelight that flickered through the broken door showed an ironical
+contrast between the home that now was and that which once had been, and
+to which I looked back with such loving thoughts that night. A narrow
+wooden bedstead, as battered and crippled as Little Lottie, but without
+the latter's air of sympathy and companionship; a tremulous kitchen
+table; a long box set on end and curtained off with a bit of faded
+calico, a single chair with a mended leg--these rude conveniences
+comprised my total list of housekeeping effects, not forgetting, of
+course, the dish-pan, the stubby broom, and the coal-scuttle, along with
+the scanty assortment of thick, chipped dishes and the pots and pans on
+the shelf behind the calico curtain. There was no bureau, only a waved
+bit of looking-glass over the sink in the corner. My wardrobe was strung
+along the row of nails behind the door, a modest array of petticoats and
+skirts and shirt-waists, with a winter coat and a felt sailor-hat.
+Beneath them, set at right angles to the corner, was the little
+old-fashioned swell-top trunk, which precaution prompted me to drag
+before the door. It had been my mother's trunk, and this was the first
+journey it had made since it carried her bridal finery to and from the
+Philadelphia Centennial. In the quiet, uneventful years that followed it
+had reposed in a big, roomy old garret, undisturbed save at the annual
+spring house-cleaning, or when we children played "The Mistletoe Bough"
+and hid in it the skeleton which had descended to us as a relic of our
+grandfather's student days.
+
+What a change for the little old trunk and what a change for me the last
+twelve months had brought about! After the door had been further
+barricaded by piling the chair on top of the trunk, and the coal-scuttle
+on top of the chair, I blew out the evil-smelling lamp and crept with
+fear and trembling into a most inhospitable-looking bed. It received my
+slight weight with a groan, and creaked dismally every time I stirred.
+Through the thin mattress I could feel the slats, that seemed hard
+bands of pain across my tired body.
+
+From where I was lying I could look straight into Little Lottie's heart,
+now a steady, glowing mass of coals. Little Lottie invited me to
+retrospection. How different it all was in reality from what I had
+imagined it would be! In the story-books it is always so alluring--this
+coming to a great city to seek one's fortune. A year ago I had been
+teaching in a little school-house among my Pennsylvania hills, and I
+recalled now, very vividly, how I used to love, on just such cold winter
+nights as this, when the wind whistled at every keyhole of the
+farm-house where I boarded during the school year to pull my
+rocking-chair into the chimney-corner and read magazine stories about
+girls who lived in hall bedrooms on little or nothing a week; and of
+what good times they had, or seemed to have, with never being quite
+certain where the next meal was to come from, or whether it was to come
+at all.
+
+
+I was wakened by the rattle of dishes, the clatter of pots and pans, and
+the rancid odor of frying bacon, bespeaking the fact that somebody's
+breakfast was under way in the next room to mine. I stepped across the
+bare, cold floor to the window, and, rolling up the sagging
+black-muslin blind, looked out upon the world. Bleak and unbeautiful was
+the prospect that presented itself through the interstices of the spiral
+fire-escape--a narrow vista strung with clothes-lines and buttressed all
+about with the rear walls of high, gaunt, tottering tenements, the dirty
+windows of which were filled with frowzy-headed women and children.
+Something interesting was going on below, for in a moment every window
+was thrown up, and a score of heads leaned far out. I followed suit.
+
+In the sloppy, slush-filled courtyard below two untidy women were
+engaged in coarse vituperation that shortly led to blows. The window
+next to mine was quickly raised, and I drew back to escape being
+included in the category of curious spectators to this disgraceful
+scene--but too late.
+
+"What's the row?" a voice asked with friendly familiarity. It was the
+girl who had been frying the bacon, and she still held a greasy knife in
+her hand. I answered that I did not know. She was very young, hardly
+more than sixteen. She had a coarse, bold, stupid face, topped by a
+heavy black pompadour that completely concealed any forehead she might
+be supposed to possess. She was decidedly an ill-looking girl; but the
+young fellow in his shirt-sleeves who now stuck his head out of the
+window alongside of hers was infinitely more so. He had a weak face,
+covered with pimples, and the bridge of his nose was broken; but,
+despite these manifest facial defects, and notwithstanding the squalor
+of his surroundings, a very high collar and a red necktie gave him the
+unmistakable air of the cheap dandy. Again I gave a civil evasion to the
+girl's trivial question, and as I did so her companion, looking over her
+frowzy pompadour, stared at me with insolent familiarity. I jerked my
+head in hurriedly, and, shutting the window, turned my attention to
+Little Lottie. It was not long before my tea-kettle was singing merrily.
+I was about to sit down to the first meal in my new abode, when an
+insinuating rat-tat sounded on the door. I opened it to find the
+ill-looking young fellow leaning languidly against the door-jamb, a
+cigarette between his teeth.
+
+"What do you wish?" I asked, in my most matter-of-fact manner.
+
+He puffed some smoke in my face, then took the cigarette from his mouth
+and looked at me, evidently at a loss for an answer.
+
+"The girl in there wants to know if you'll loan her one of your plates,"
+he replied at last.
+
+"I am sorry," I said, with freezing politeness--"I am very sorry, but I
+have only one plate, and I'll need that myself," and I closed the door.
+
+After breakfast I walked up to First Avenue to lay in my provisions for
+the day--a loaf of bread, a quart of potatoes, a quarter of a pound of
+butter, and two cents' worth of milk. Never in my life before had I
+bought anything on the Sabbath day, and never before had I seen a place
+of business open for trade on that day. My people had not been sternly
+religious people, and, theoretically, I didn't think I was doing
+anything wicked; yet I felt, as I gave my order to the groceryman, as
+though I were violating every sacred tradition of birth and breeding.
+After that I tried to do all necessary marketing the day before, and if
+I needed anything on Sunday I made myself go without it.
+
+Returning with my unholy provisions tucked under my arm and a
+broken-nosed blue pitcher deftly concealed under my protecting cape, I
+made my first daylight inventory of that block of Fourteenth Street
+where I lived. On each corner stood a gaudy saloon, surmounted by a
+Raines law hotel. It seemed to have been at one time the abode of
+fashion, for though both ends of the block were supported by business
+buildings, the entire middle presented a solid front of brownstone,
+broken at intervals by long flights of steps leading to handsome,
+though long-neglected black-walnut doors. The basements were given over
+to trade.
+
+On the stairs I was brought face to face again with my sinister-looking
+young man. I looked straight ahead, so as to avoid his eyes. But I found
+the way blocked, as he stretched his arms from banister to wall.
+
+"What's the matter with you?" he began coaxingly. "Say, I'll take you to
+the theater, if you want to go. What do you say to 'The Jolly Grass
+Widows' to-morrow night?"
+
+Thoroughly frightened, I responded to the unwarranted invitation by
+retreating two steps down the stairs, whereupon the young ruffian jumped
+down and grasped the arm in which I held my packages. I don't know what
+nerved me up to such a heroic defense, but in the twinkling of an eye he
+fell sprawling down the stairs, followed by the flying remnants of my
+landlady's milk-pitcher. Then I ran up the remaining two flights as fast
+as my feet would carry me, and landed in the midst of an altercation
+between the inarticulate landlady and my girl neighbor. In passing, I
+could make out enough of the wrangle to understand that the latter was
+being ordered out of the house.
+
+When quietness had been restored, there was a tap at my door. I
+demanded the name of my visitor in as brave a voice as I could command.
+"Mrs. Pringle," returned the broken voice of the landlady. I saw, when I
+opened the door, that she wanted to talk to me. I also saw, what I had
+not noticed in my hasty interview the night before, that she was
+superior to most of the women of her class. She had been grimy and
+unkempt the night before, after her long week's work of sweeping and
+cleaning and coal-carrying; but to-day, in her clean wrapper and smooth
+gray hair, there was a pathetic Sabbath-day air of cleanliness about her
+spare, bent figure. Somehow, I felt that she would not be so very angry
+when I explained about the pitcher, and I invited her in with genuine
+cordiality.
+
+She listened in silence to my story, her knotted hands folded upon her
+starched gingham apron.
+
+"That's all right!" she replied, a smile lighting up her tired face.
+"I'm just glad you broke the pitcher over that vile fellow's head."
+
+"You know him, then?" I suggested.
+
+She shook her head. "No, I don't know him, but I know the bad lot he
+belongs to. I've just warned this girl in here to leave as soon as she
+can pack her things. I gave her back her rent-money. She only come day
+afore yesterday, and I supposed she was an honest working-girl or I'd
+never have took her. She pretended to me she was a skirt-hand, and it
+turns out she's nothin' but a common trollop. And I hated to turn her
+out, too, even if she did talk back to me something awful. She can't be
+more 'n sixteen; but, somehow or t' other, when a girl like that goes to
+be bad, there ain't no use trying to reason 'em out of it. You come from
+the country, don't you?"
+
+There was a kindly curiosity mirrored in the dim, sunken eyes which
+surveyed me steadily, a lingering accent of repressed tenderness in her
+voice, and I did not deem it beneath my dignity to tell this decent,
+motherly soul my little story.
+
+She listened attentively. "I knowed you were a well-brought-up young
+woman the moment I laid eyes on you," she began, the maimed words
+falling gently from her lips, despite the high, cracked voice in which
+they were spoken. "And I knowed you was from the country, too; so I did.
+You don't mind, honey, do you, if I speak sort of plain with you, being
+as I'm an old woman and you just a slip of a girl? Do you, now?"
+
+I replied that she might speak just as plainly as she liked with me and
+I would take no offense, and then she smiled approvingly upon me and
+drew her little checked breakfast-shawl closer about her sunken bosom.
+
+"I like to hear you say that," she went on, "because so many girls won't
+listen to a word of advice--least of all when it comes from an old woman
+that they thinks don't know as much as they does. They don't relish
+being told how careful they ought to be about the people they get
+acquainted with. Now I'm talking to you just as if you was one of my
+own. You may think you are wise, and all that,--and you are a bright
+sort of girl, I'll give you credit for that, only this is such a wicked
+city. A young girl like you, with no folks of her own to go to when
+she's discouraged and blue, 'll find plenty and to spare that'll be
+willing to lead her off. This is a bad neighborhood you're in, and you
+got to be mighty careful about yourself. Forewarned is forearmed, as
+you've heard tell before; and I have saw so many young girls go wrong
+that I felt could have been saved if somebody had just up and talked
+straight at them in the beginning, like I'm talking here to you. I had a
+girl here in this house two years agone. A pretty girl she was, and she
+was from the country too. Somewheres up in Connecticut she come from.
+She was a nice, innocent girl too, so she was, when she come here to
+rent a room. This very room you've got was the one she had. Just as
+quiet and modest and respectful spoken to her elders as you are, she
+was. She worked down in St. Mark's Place. She was a cap-maker and got
+four dollars a week. She started out to live honest, for she'd been
+brought up decent. Her father, she told me when she come here, was a
+blacksmith in some of them little country towns up there. She thought
+she could make lots of money to come down here to work, and that she
+could have a fine time; and I guess she was terrible disappointed when
+she found just how things really was. She hankered for fine clothes and
+to go to theaters, and there wasn't any chanst for neither on four
+dollars a week. By and by, though, she did get to going out some with a
+young fellow that worked where she did. He was a nice, decent young
+fellow, and I'll warrant you she could have married him if she had acted
+wise and sensible; and he'd like as not have made her a good provider. I
+don't blame the men out and out, as some folks do; and I say that when a
+young fellow sees that a girl 'll let him act free with her, he just
+says to himself she'll let other fellows act free with her, and then he
+don't want to marry her, no difference how much he might have thought of
+her to begin with. That's what, I think, started this girl going wrong.
+At first he'd just bring her to the door when they'd be out to the
+theater, but by and by she got to taking him up to her room. Now it's
+none of my business to interfere with people's comings and goings in
+this house, being as I'm only the janitress. I have my orders from the
+boss--who's a real nice sort of man--to only rent rooms to respectable
+people, and to put anybody out where I knows there's bad conduct going
+on. He's strong on morals, the boss is. He used to be a saloon-keeper,
+and the Salvation Army converted him; and then he sold out and went into
+this business. He has this place, and then he has a boarding-house on
+Second Avenue. These Germans are awful kind men, when they are kind, and
+Mr. Schneider has did a lot of good. If any of his tenants get sick and
+can't pay their rent, or if they get out of work, he don't bounce them
+into the street, but he just tells them to stay on and pay him when they
+get caught up; and would you believe it that he never loses a cent,
+either!"
+
+Here the woman stopped for breath, which gave me an opportunity to turn
+the channel of her talk back to the girl from Connecticut.
+
+"Well, I didn't have no right to tell the girl that she mustn't take her
+gentleman friend to her room, because there ain't no law again it in
+any light-housekeeping rooms. The people who live here are all
+working-people and earn their livings; and they've got a right to do as
+they please so they're quiet and respectable. But I took it on myself to
+kind of let the girl understand that her beau would think more of her if
+she just dropped him at the front door. A man 'll always pick a spunky,
+independent girl that sort of keeps him at a stand-off every time,
+anyway. She looked sort of miffed when I said this, and then I said that
+she could set up with him any time she wanted in my sitting-room in the
+basement, what is real comfortable furnished and pretty-looking--and
+which you too is perfectly welcome to bring any gentleman company to any
+time you've a mind.
+
+"Well, she looked at me sort of scornful, and answered me real
+peart-like, and said she guessed she could take care of herself. She
+tossed her head in a pretty taking way she had, and walked down-stairs,
+as though I had turribly insulted her; so what could I do?"
+
+Again she paused, panting for breath in short, wheezy gasps.
+
+"And what became of her at last?" I asked.
+
+"What became of her!" she echoed. "What becomes of all of 'em?" and she
+jerked her head significantly in the vague direction of the street. "She
+left soon after that, though I never said another word to her, but just
+kept on bidding her the time of day, as if nothing had ever passed
+between us. I felt turrible about her leaving, too; and I tried to
+persuade her she was making a mistake by leaving a house that she knowed
+was decent and where she could manage to live within her means. Oh, you
+don't know how I felt for days and weeks after she went. I knew how good
+she was when she come to this house, and I kept thinking how my Annie
+might have been just as foolish and heedless if she'd been throwed
+amongst strangers and had the same temptations. I don't know where she
+went exactly. She didn't give me much satisfaction about it, and I never
+seen her again, till one morning this winter, when I went out to bring
+in my ash-cans, I run right into her. It was real early in the morning,
+just getting daylight. I always get up at five o'clock winter and
+summer, because I'm used to it; and then I've got to, so's to get the
+work done, for I can't work fast with my rheumatics. It was hardly light
+enough yet for me to recognize her right away, and she did look so
+forlorn and pitiful-like walking there so early in the morning in the
+snow. It had snowed in the night, and it was the first we'd had this
+season. She didn't see me at first. She was walking slow,--real slow and
+lingering-like,--like them poor things do. I was standing at the top of
+the stairs in the areaway, and her face was turned across the street, as
+if she was expecting somebody. I tried to speak to her, but sometimes
+something catches me when I'm strong moved and I can't sound a word for
+several moments. And that's the way I was struck that morning. I started
+to run after her; then I thought better of it, and sort of guessed she'd
+turn around at the corner and come back. So I went to the cans and made
+believe to be turrible interested in them, and when I looked up, sure
+enough she had started back again, and I had caught her eye.
+
+"Thinking of Annie, I bade her the time of day real friendly-like, just
+as though everything was all right, and I asked her to come in and have
+a bite of breakfast. I'd left the coffee on the stove, and had fried
+myself a nice mess of onions. She looked sort of half shamed and half
+grateful, and had started to come with me, when all of a sudden she
+stopped and said she guessed she couldn't that morning. Then she
+strolled off again. I picked up my ash-cans and started down-stairs, but
+I wasn't half-way down when I saw her hurrying along the other side of
+the street with a man I'd seen come round the corner by Skelly's saloon
+while we was talking together. And I never saw her again."
+
+An expression of pathos, infinitely sweet and tender, had crept into the
+woman's thin, worn face--an expression in strange, almost ludicrous,
+contrast to the high, cracked voice in which the talc had been
+delivered. I gazed at the bent old creature with something like
+reverence for the nobility which I now could read so plainly in every
+line of her face--the nobility which can attach itself only to decency
+of life and thought and action. In my brief interview with her in the
+twilight of the evening before I had heard only the ridiculous jargon of
+a woman without a palate, and I had seen only an old crone with a
+soot-smeared face. But now the maimed voice echoed in my ears like the
+sound of the little old melodeon with the broken strings--which had been
+my mother's.
+
+"I must be going now," she said, rising with an effort. "You'll come
+down and see me sometimes, won't you, honey? I like young people. They
+sort of cheer me up when I feel down. Come down this afternoon, if you
+haven't got any place to go. Come down and I'll lend you some books."
+
+I thanked her, and promised I would.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+WHEREIN FATE BRINGS ME GOOD FORTUNE IN ONE HAND AND DISASTER IN THE
+OTHER
+
+
+Monday morning--a cheerless, bleak Monday morning, with the rain falling
+upon the slush-filled streets. I ate a hurried breakfast of bread and
+butter and black coffee, locked my door, and started out with renewed
+vigor to look for a job. I had learned by this time to use a little
+discrimination in answering advertisements; and from now on I paid
+attention to such prospective employers only as stated the nature of
+their business and gave a street number.
+
+I had also learned another important thing, and that was that I could
+not afford to be too particular about the nature of my job, as I watched
+my small capital diminish day by day, despite my frugality. I would have
+been glad, now, to get work at anything that promised the chance of a
+meager livelihood. Anything to get a foothold. The chief obstacle seemed
+to be my inexperience. I could obtain plenty of work which in time
+promised to pay me five dollars a week, but in the two or three months'
+time necessary to acquire dexterity I should have starved to death, for
+I had not money to carry me over this critical period.
+
+Work was plenty enough. It nearly always is so. The question was not how
+to get a job, but how to live by such jobs as I could get. The low wages
+offered to green hands--two and a half to three dollars a week--might do
+for the girl who lived at home; but I had to pay room-rent and car-fare
+and to buy food. So, as long as my small capital could be made to hold
+out I continued my search for something that would pay at least five
+dollars a week to begin with.
+
+On Monday night I was no nearer to being a bread-winner than when I had
+started out for the first time from Miss Jamison's boarding-house. I
+climbed the bare stairs at nightfall, and as I fumbled at the keyhole I
+could hear the click of a typewriter in the room next to mine. My room
+was quite dark, but there was a patch of dim white on the floor that
+sent a thrill of gladness all over me. I lighted the lamp and tore open
+the precious envelop before taking off my gloves or hat. It was a note
+from Minnie Plympton, saying she had got employment as demonstrator for
+a cereal-food company, and was making a tour of the small New England
+cities. The letter was dated at Bangor, Maine, and she asked me to write
+her at Portland, where she expected to be all week; and which I did, at
+considerable length, after I had cooked and eaten my supper.
+
+Bread and butter and black coffee for breakfast, and potato-soup and
+bread and butter for supper, with plain bread and butter done up in a
+piece of paper and carried with me for luncheon--this was my daily menu
+for the weeks that followed, varied on two occasions by the purchase of
+a half-pint of New Orleans molasses.
+
+
+The advertisements for cigar and cigarette workers were very numerous;
+and as that sounded like humble work, I thought I might stand a better
+chance in that line than any other. Accordingly I applied to the foreman
+of a factory in Avenue A, who wanted "bunch-makers." He heard my
+petition in a drafty hallway through which a small army of boys and
+girls were pouring, each one stopping to insert a key in a
+time-register. They were just coming to work, for I was very early. The
+foreman, a young German, cut me off unceremoniously by asking to see my
+working-card; and when I looked at him blankly, for I hadn't a ghost of
+an idea what he meant, he strode away in disgust, leaving me to
+conjecture as to his meaning.
+
+Nothing daunted, however, for I meant to be very energetic and brave
+that morning, I went to the next factory. Here they wanted "labelers,"
+and as this sounded easy, I approached the foreman with something like
+confidence. He asked what experience I'd had, and I gave him a truthful
+reply.
+
+"Sorry, but we're not running any kindergarten here," he replied curtly
+and turned away.
+
+I was still determined that I'd join the rank of cigar-makers. Somehow,
+they impressed me as a very prosperous lot of people, and there was
+something pungent and wholesome in the smell of the big, bright
+workrooms.
+
+The third foreman I besought was an elderly German with a paternal
+manner. He listened to me kindly, said I looked quick, and offered to
+put me on as an apprentice, explaining with much pomposity that
+cigar-making was a very difficult trade, at which I must serve a three
+years' apprenticeship before I could become a member of the union and
+entitled to draw union wages. I left him feeling very humble, and
+likewise disillusioned of my cigar-making ambitions.
+
+"Girls wanted to learn binding and folding--paid while learning." The
+address took me to Brooklyn Bridge and down a strange, dark thoroughfare
+running toward the East River. Above was the great bridge, unreal,
+fairy-like in the morning mist. I was looking for Rose Street, which
+proved to be a zigzag alley that wriggled through one of the great
+bridge arches into a world of book-binderies. Rose Street was choked
+with moving carts loaded with yellow-back literature done up in bales.
+The superintendent proved to be a civil young man. He did not need me
+before Monday, but he told me to come back that day at half-past seven
+and to bring a bone paper-cutter with me. He paid only three dollars a
+week, and I accepted, but with the hope that as this was only Thursday,
+and not yet nine o'clock, I might find something better in the meantime.
+
+A Brooklyn merchant was in need of two "salesladies--experience not
+necessary." A trolley-car swirled me across the river, now glistering in
+the spring sunshine. We were hurtled down interminable vistas of small
+shops, always under the grim iron trestle of the elevated railroad. At
+the end of an hour I entered the "Majestic," a small store stocked with
+trash. After much dickering, Mr. Lindbloom and his wife decided I'd do
+at three and a half dollars per week, working from seven in the morning
+till nine in the evening, Saturdays till midnight. I departed with the
+vow that if I must work and starve, I should not do both in Lindbloom's.
+
+Five cents got me back to Cortlandt Street in Manhattan, where I called
+upon a candy-manufacturer who wanted bonbon-makers. The French foreman,
+in snowy cap and apron, received me in a great room dazzling with
+white-tile walls and floor, and filled with bright-eyed girls, also in
+caps and aprons, and working before marble tables. The Frenchman was
+polite and apologetic, but they never hired any but experienced workers.
+
+It was half-past three, and I had two more names on my list. Rose-making
+sounded attractive, and I walked all the way up to Bond Street. Shabby
+and prosaic, this street, strangely enough, has been selected as the
+forcing-ground or nursery of artificial flowers. Its signs on both
+sides, even unto the top floor, proclaim some specialization of
+fashionable millinery--flowers, feathers, aigrets, wire hat-frames. On
+the third floor, rear, of a once fashionable mansion, now fallen into
+decay, I stumbled into a room, radiantly scarlet with roses. The
+jangling bell attached to the door aroused no curiosity whatever in the
+white-faced girls bending over these gay garlands. It was a signal,
+though, for a thick-set beetle-browed young fellow to bounce in from the
+next room and curtly demand my business.
+
+"We only pay a dollar and a half to learners," he said, smiling
+unpleasantly over large yellow teeth. I fled in dismay. Down Broadway,
+along Bleecker, and up squalid Thompson Street I hurried to a paper-box
+factory.
+
+The office of E. Springer & Company was in pleasant contrast to the
+flower sweat-shop, for all its bright colors. So, too, was there a
+grateful comparison between the Jew of the ugly smile and the portly
+young man who sat behind a glass partition and acknowledged my entrance
+by glancing up from his ledger. The remark he made was evidently witty
+and not intended for my ears, for it made the assistant bookkeeper--a
+woman--and the two women typewriters laugh and crane their necks in my
+direction. The bookkeeper climbed down from his high stool and opened
+the glass door. He was as kind now as he was formerly merry. Possibly he
+had seen my chin quiver the least bit, and knew I was almost ready to
+cry. He did not ask many questions; but presently he sent one typewriter
+flying up-stairs for the superintendent, and the other was sent to ask
+of the forewoman if all the jobs were filled. The superintendent proved
+to be a woman, shrewd, keen-faced, and bespectacled. The forewoman sent
+down word that No. 105 had not rung up that morning, and that I could
+have her key. The pay was three dollars a week to learners, but Miss
+Price, the superintendent, thought I could learn in a week's time, which
+opinion the portly gentleman heartily indorsed, and so I allowed him to
+enroll my name. He gave me a key, showed me how to "ring up" in the
+register at the foot of the stairs, and told me that henceforth I should
+be known as "105."
+
+I thanked him in as steady a voice as I could command, and reached the
+street door on the stroke of six, just in time to hear my shopmates of
+the morrow laughing and scrambling down-stairs in their mad effort to
+get away from that which I had been trying to obtain for so many weeks.
+
+The street I stepped into had been transformed. Behind my blurred
+vision, as I hurried along, I saw no squalor, no wretchedness now.
+Through tears of thankfulness the houses, the streets, and the hurrying
+people were all glorified, all transfigured. Everything was right--the
+whole world and everybody in it.
+
+Thus I sped homeward on that eventful evening, eager to tell my good
+news to Mrs. Pringle, who, I knew, would be glad to hear it. As I drew
+near the block where I lived, I became half conscious of something
+strange and unusual in the atmosphere; I felt the strange sensation of
+being lost, of being in the wrong place. Men and women stood about in
+silent knots, and through the deep twilight I felt rather than heard the
+deep throbbing of fire-engines. Pressing through the little knots of men
+and women, I stood before the red mass of embers and watched the firemen
+pour their quenching streams upon the ashes of my lodging-house.
+
+Dazed, stupefied, I asked questions of the bystanders. But nobody knew
+anything definite. One man said he guessed a good many lives had been
+lost; the woman next to him said she'd heard the number was five.
+
+The houses on both sides were still standing, the windows smashed in,
+and the tenants fled. There seemed to be not even a neighbor who might
+know of the fate of my lodging-house acquaintance or of my good friend
+Mrs. Pringle. I spoke to a policeman. He listened gently, and then
+conducted me to a house in Fifteenth Street, where they had offered
+shelter for the night to any refugees who might desire it.
+
+The basement of this house had been turned into a dormitory, one
+section for the men and the other for the women, who were in greater
+number and came straggling in one by one. A man-servant in livery passed
+hot coffee and sandwiches, which we swallowed mechanically, regarding
+one another and our surroundings with stupid bewilderment. I had never
+met any of these people before, though they had all been my
+fellow-lodgers.
+
+The girl sitting on the cot next to mine passed her cup up for more
+coffee, and as she did so turned a quizzical gaze upon me. She was
+stupid and ugly. Her quizzical look deepened into curiosity, and by and
+by she asked:
+
+"Youse didn't live there too, did youse?"
+
+Our common misfortune inspired me to a cordial reply, and we fell into a
+discussion of the catastrophe. Her English was so sadly perverted and
+her voice so guttural that I could make out her meaning only with the
+greatest exercise of the imagination. But it was to the effect that the
+fire had started in a room on the top floor, whither poor old Mrs.
+Pringle had gone about three o'clock in the afternoon with a bucket of
+coal for the fire. Just what happened nobody knew. Every one on the top
+floor at the time had perished, including Mrs. Pringle.
+
+"Didn't youse get nothin' out, neither?" asked my companion. And then
+it dawned upon me for the first time that I had nothing in all the world
+now but the clothes on my back and the promise of work on the morrow.
+
+"Yes, I have lost everything," I answered.
+
+"Youse got anything in the bank?" she pursued.
+
+The question seemed to me ironical and not worthy of notice.
+
+"I have. I've got 'most five hundred dollars saved up," she went on.
+
+"Five hundred dollars!"
+
+The girl nodded. "Huh, that's what! I could live tony if I wanted, but I
+like to save my money. I makes good money, too,--twelve dollars a
+week,--and I don't spend it, neither."
+
+"What do you do?" I asked, regarding the large, rough hands with
+something like admiration for their earning abilities.
+
+"I'm a lady-buffer," she answered, with a touch of pride.
+
+"A lady-buffer! What's that?" I cried, looking at the slovenly,
+dirt-streaked wrapper and the shabby golf-cape that had slipped from her
+shoulders to the cot. She regarded me with pity for my ignorance, and
+then delivered herself of an axiom.
+
+"A lady-buffer is a lady what buffs." And, to render the definition
+still more explicit, she rolled up the sleeve of her wrapper, showed me
+mighty biceps, and then with her arm performed several rapid revolutions
+in midair.
+
+"What do you buff?" I next ventured.
+
+"Brass!"
+
+This laconic reply squelched me completely, and I subsided without
+further conversation.
+
+Despite my weariness, there was little sleep for me that night. Affairs
+had come to a crisis; my condition was about as bad as it could possibly
+be. Whatever was going to become of me? Why, in the name of all common
+sense, had I ever come to New York? Why was I not content to remain a
+country school-ma'am, in a place where a country school-ma'am was looked
+up to as something of a personage? That night, if I had had enough money
+to buy a ticket back to the town I had come from, my fate would have
+been settled definitely then and there.
+
+Not the least distressing part of my condition was the fact that there
+was really no help for me save what I should be able to give myself. To
+be sure, I had certain distant relatives and friends who had warned me
+against my flight to the city, and to whom I might have written begging
+for money sufficient to carry me back to my native place, and the money,
+with many "I-told-you-so's," would have been forthcoming. To return
+discredited was more than my pride could bear. I had to earn my
+livelihood anyway, and so, on this night of grim adversity, owing my
+very bed and supper to charity, I set my teeth, and closed my tired lids
+over the tears I could not hide, and swore I'd fight it out alone, so
+long as I had strength to stand and heart to hope; and then there was
+the prospect of a job at Springer's on the morrow, though the wage would
+hardly keep body and soul together.
+
+
+The next morning, while her servants were giving us our breakfast, a
+stately middle-aged woman came down to the basement and passed among us,
+making inquiries regarding our various conditions, and offering words of
+well-meant, if patronizing, advice and suggestion wherever she thought
+them needed, but which somehow did not seem to be relished as her more
+material kindness had been. When it came my turn to be interviewed I
+answered her many questions frankly and promptly, and, encouraged by the
+evident interest which she displayed in my case, I was prompted to ask
+her if she might know of any place where I could get work. She looked
+at me a moment out of fine, clear eyes.
+
+"You would not go into service, I suppose?" she asked slowly.
+
+I had never thought of such an alternative before, but I met it without
+a moment's hesitation. "No, I would not care to go into service," I
+replied, and as I did so the lady's face showed mingled disappointment
+and disgust.
+
+"That is too bad," she answered, "for in that case I'm afraid I can do
+nothing for you." And with that she went out of the room, leaving me, I
+must confess, not sorry for having thus bluntly declared against wearing
+the definite badge of servitude.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+IN WHICH I AM "LEARNED" BY PHOEBE IN THE ART OF BOX-MAKING
+
+
+The "lady-buffer" and I were the last to leave the house. We went out
+together and parted company at Third Avenue, she going south to her
+work, and I continuing along the street westward. The catastrophe of the
+preceding day seemed to have entirely evaporated from her memory; she
+seemed also to have forgotten the incident of our meeting and
+conversation of the night before, for she made no comment, nor even gave
+me a parting greeting.
+
+I was inclined to reproach such heartlessness as I hurried along, when
+suddenly it was borne in upon my consciousness that it was I, not she,
+who was open to that charge. Here I was, speeding along to my work with
+hope in my heart, sometimes almost forgetting that the woman who had
+been so kind to me was probably lying in the morgue, awaiting burial in
+the Potter's Field, unless saved from that ignoble end by some friend.
+And yet I was powerless. I could not even spare time to go to the morgue
+or to make inquiries. I knew not a soul who could have helped me, and I
+had only one dollar and a half in all the world, no place to sleep that
+night, no change of garments, nothing except the promise of work that
+morning at Springer's. I stopped at the corner, strongly tempted by my
+innate sense of decency to the memory of the dead. But only for a
+moment: the law of life--self-preservation--again asserted itself, and
+for the time being I put the past behind me and hurried on toward
+Thompson Street.
+
+It lacked but a few minutes of eight o'clock when, at last, I turned
+into the squalid street at the end of which stands Springer's. In the
+sunshine of the mild March morning the facade of the tall buff building
+looked for all the world like a gaunt, ugly, unkempt hag, frowning
+between bleared old eyes that seemed to coax--nay, rather to coerce me
+into entering her awful house.
+
+The instant impression was one of repulsion, and the impulse was to run
+away. But there was fascination, too, in the hag-like visage of those
+grim brick walls, checkered with innumerable dirty windows and trussed
+up, like a paralytic old crone, with rusty fire-escapes. It was the
+fascination of the mysterious and of the evil; and, repulsive and
+forbidding as was its general aspect, nothing could now have induced me
+to turn back. Instinct told me that I was about to enter into no
+commonplace experience. And so, unresisting, I was borne along in the
+swift current of humanity that was swept down the street, like the water
+in a mill-race, to turn the wheels of workshop and factory. Before
+Springer's a great arm of this human mill-stream eddied inward, to be
+lost in another moment in the vortex of the wide black doors, whence
+issued muffled sounds of the pandemonium within. At the last moment I
+hesitated, obsessed once more with the indefinable horror of it all.
+Again there was the strong impulse to run away--far, far away from
+Springer's and from Thompson Street, when suddenly the old monody began
+to ring in my ears, "WORK OR STARVE, WORK OR STARVE!" Another moment,
+and I too had passed within the wide black doors.
+
+The entrance passage was lighted by a sickly gas-jet, and in its flicker
+a horde of loud-mouthed girls were making frantic efforts to insert
+their keys in the time-register. I was jostled and tumbled over
+unceremoniously. I was pushed and punched unmercifully by the crowding
+elbows, until I found myself squeezed tight against the wall. From the
+scrambling and confusion it was evident everybody was late, and tones
+and language attested to racked nerves and querulous tempers. Suddenly
+there was a scuffle and the sharp scraping of feet on the floor.
+
+"Get out, yez dirty Irish!" rang out in the stifling air.
+
+"I wuz here fust!" snarled another voice.
+
+"Call me dirty Irish ag'in and I'll dirty Irish you."
+
+The black-haired girl had accepted the challenge, and the maligned
+daughter of Erin, cheeks aflame and eyes blazing, rushed at her
+detractor with clenched fist.
+
+"Go for her, Rosie! She's nothin' but a dirty black Ginney, nohow!"
+
+"Pitch into her, Celie! Punch her!" yelled a chorus from the stairs who
+came swooping down from above, attracted by the scrimmage, and just in
+time to see the combatants rush at each other in a hand-to-hand
+struggle, punctuated with loud oaths.
+
+The noise suddenly subsided at the screeching of a raucous nasal voice.
+
+"Well, young ladies! What does this mean?" demanded the superintendent,
+and Rosie and Celie both began to talk at once.
+
+"Never mind about the rest of it," snapped Miss Price, cutting the tale
+short. "I'll dock you both half a day's pay: and the next time it
+happens you'll both be fired on the spot."
+
+Then Miss Price turned to me, while the now silent wranglers meekly
+turned their keys in the register and marched up-stairs, whither their
+respective factions had since disappeared.
+
+"I do hope to goodness you ain't high-tempered like some is," she
+remarked, with an effort toward affability, as we stepped before the
+time-register, where I inserted my key for the first time. "All I got to
+say is, don't get into no fights with the girls. When they say things to
+you, don't talk back. It's them that just takes things as they come, and
+lets bygones be bygones, that get the good checks at the end of the
+week. Some of them fight more 'n they work, but I guess you won't be
+that kind," she concluded, with an unctuous smile, displaying two rows
+of false teeth. Then, with a quick, nervous, jerky gait, she hopped up
+the flight of rough plank stairs, threw open a door, and ushered me into
+the bedlam noises of the "loft," where, amid the roar of machinery and
+the hum of innumerable voices, I was to meet my prospective forewoman.
+
+"Miss Kinzer! Here's a lady wants to learn," shrilled the high nasal
+voice. "Miss Kinzer! Where's Miss Kinzer? Oh, here you are!" as a young
+woman emerged from behind a pile of pasteboard boxes. "I've a learner
+for you, Miss Kinzer. She's a green girl, but she looks likely, and I
+want you to give her a good chance. Better put her on table-work to
+begin with." And with that injunction the little old maid hopped away,
+leaving me to the scrutiny and cross-questioning of a rather pretty
+woman of twenty-eight or thirty.
+
+"Ever worked in a factory before?" she began, with lofty indifference,
+as if it didn't matter whether I had or had not.
+
+"No."
+
+"Where did you work?"
+
+"I never worked any place before."
+
+"Oh-h!" There was a world of meaning, as I afterward discovered, in Miss
+Kinzer's long-drawn-out "Oh-h!" In this instance she looked up quickly,
+with an obvious display of interest, as if she had just unearthed a
+remarkable specimen in one who had never worked at anything before.
+
+"You're not used to work, then?" she remarked insinuatingly,
+straightening up from the rude desk where she sat like the judge of a
+police-court. She was now all attention.
+
+"Well, not exactly that," I replied, nettled by her manner and, above
+all, by her way of putting things. "I have worked before, but never at
+factory-work."
+
+"Then why didn't you say so?"
+
+She now opened her book and inscribed my name therein.
+
+"Where do you live?"
+
+"Over in East Fourteenth Street," I replied mechanically, forgetting for
+the moment the catastrophe that had rendered me more homeless than ever.
+
+"Home?"
+
+"No, I room." Then, reading only too quickly an unpleasant
+interpretation in the uplifted eyebrows, a disagreeable curiosity
+mirrored in the brown eyes beneath, I added hastily, "I have no home. My
+folks are all dead."
+
+What impression this bit of information made I was unable to determine
+as I followed her slender, slightly bowed figure across the busy,
+roaring workroom.
+
+"Be careful you don't get hurt," she cried, as we threaded a narrow
+passage in and out among the stamping, throbbing machinery, where, by
+the light that filtered through the grimy windows, I got vague, confused
+glimpses of girl-faces shining like stars out of this dark, fearful
+chaos of revolving belts and wheels, and above the bedlam noises came
+girlish laughter and song.
+
+"Good morning, Carrie!" one quick-witted toiler sang out as she spied
+the new girl in tow of the forewoman, and suddenly the whole room had
+taken up the burden of the song.
+
+"Don't mind them," my conductor remarked. "They don't mean nothing by
+it--watch out there for your head!"
+
+Safe through the outlying ramparts of machinery, we entered the domain
+of the table-workers, and I was turned over to Phoebe, a tall girl in
+tortoise ear-rings and curl-papers. Phoebe was assigned to "learn" me in
+the trade of "finishing." Somewhat to my surprise, she assumed the task
+joyfully, and helped me off with my coat and hat. From the loud-mouthed
+tirades as to "Annie Kinzer's nerve," it became evident that the
+assignment of the job of "learner" is one to cause heartburning
+jealousies, and that Phoebe, either because of some special adaptability
+or through favoritism, got the lion's share of novices.
+
+"That's right, Phoebe; hog every new girl that comes along!" amiably
+bawled a bright-faced, tidy young woman who answered to the name of Mrs.
+Smith. Mrs. Smith worked briskly as she talked, and the burden of her
+conversation appeared to be the heaping of this sort of good-natured
+invective upon the head of her chum--or, as she termed it, her
+"lady-friend," Phoebe. The amiability with which Mrs. Smith dealt out
+her epithets was only equaled by the perfect good nature of her victim,
+who replied to each and all of them with a musically intoned, "Hot air!"
+
+"Hot A--i--r!" The clear tones of Phoebe's soprano set the echoes
+ringing all over the great workroom. In and out among the aisles and
+labyrinthine passages that wind through towering piles of boxes, from
+the thundering machinery far over on the other side of the "loft" to the
+dusky recess of the uttermost table, the musical cry reverberated.
+
+"Hot a--i--r!" Every few minutes, all through the long, weary day,
+Phoebe found occasion for sounding that magic call.
+
+"The rest of the ladies get up their backs something awful," Phoebe
+explained as she dragged a big green pasteboard box from beneath the
+work-table. "They say she gives me more 'n my share of learners because
+I'm easy to get on with, I guess, and don't play no tricks on them....
+You have a right to put your things in here along with my lunch. Them
+girls is like to do 'most anything to a new girl's duds if you wuz to
+hang them in the coat-room. Them Ginneys 'll do 'most anything. Wuz you
+down-stairs when Celie Polatta got into the fight with Rosie?"
+
+"I just missed it," she sighed in reply to my affirmative. "I was born
+unlucky."
+
+"Hello, Phoebe! So you've hogged another!" a new voice called across the
+table, and I put a question.
+
+"Why do they all want to teach the new girl? I should think they'd be
+glad to be rid of the trouble."
+
+"You mean _learn_ her? Why, because the girl that learns the green hand
+gets all her work checked on to her own card while she's learning how.
+Never worked in a box-factory before?" I shook my head.
+
+"I guessed as much. Well, box-making's a good trade. Have you an apron?"
+
+As I had not, I was then ordered to "turn my skirt," in order that I
+might receive the inevitable coat of glue and paste on its inner rather
+than on its outer surface. I gently demurred against this very slovenly
+expedient.
+
+"All right; call it hot air if you want to. I s'pose you know it all,"
+tossing her curl-papers with scorn. "You know better 'n me, of course.
+Most learners do think they knows it all. Now looky here, I've been here
+six years, and I've learned lots of green girls, and I never had one as
+didn't think she hadn't ought to turn her skirt. The ladies I'm used to
+working with likes to walk home looking decent and respectable, no
+difference what they're like other times."
+
+With the respectability of my ladyhood thus impeached, and lest I
+infringe upon the cast-iron code of box-factory etiquette, there was
+nothing to do but yield. I unhooked my skirt, dropped it to the floor,
+and stepped out of it in a trice, anxious to do anything to win back the
+good will of Phoebe. Instantly she brightened, and good humor once more
+flashed over her grimy features.
+
+"H-m! that's the stuff! There's one thing you hadn't ought to forget,
+and mind, I'm speaking as one lady-friend to another when I tell you
+these things--and that is, that you have a right to do as the other
+girls in the factory or you'll never get 'long with them. If you don't
+they'll get down on you, sure's pussy's a cat; and then they'll make it
+hot for you with complaining to the forelady. And then she'll get down
+on you after while too, and won't give you no good orders to work on;
+and--well, it's just this way: a girl mustn't be odd."
+
+Continuing her philosophy of success, Phoebe proceeded to initiate me
+into the first process of my job, which consisted in pasting slippery,
+sticky strips of muslin over the corners of the rough brown boxes that
+were piled high about us in frail, tottering towers reaching to the
+ceiling, which was trellised over with a network of electric wires and
+steam-pipes. Two hundred and fifty of these boxes remained to be
+finished on the particular order upon which Phoebe was working. Each
+must be given eight muslin strips, four on the box and four on its
+cover; two tapes, inserted with a hair-pin through awl-holes; two tissue
+"flies," to tuck over the bonnet soon to nestle underneath; four pieces
+of gay paper lace to please madame's eye when the lid is lifted; and
+three labels, one on the bottom, one on the top, and one bearing the
+name of a Fifth Avenue modiste on an escutcheon of gold and purple.
+
+The job, as it progressed, entailed ceaseless shoving and shifting and
+lifting. In order that we might not be walled in completely by our
+cumbersome materials, every few minutes we bore tottering piles across
+the floor to the "strippers."
+
+These latter, who were small girls, covered the sides with glazed paper
+on machines; and as fast as each box was thus covered it was tossed to
+the "turner-in," a still smaller girl, who turned in the overlapping
+edge of the strip, after which the box was ready to come back to the
+table for the next process at our hands.
+
+By ten o'clock, with Mrs. Smith's gay violet-boxes and our own
+bonnet-boxes, we had built a snug bower all round our particular table.
+Through its pasteboard walls the din and the songs came but faintly. My
+mates' tongues flew as fast as their fingers. The talk was chiefly
+devoted to clothes, Phoebe's social activities, and the evident
+prosperity of Mrs. Smith's husband's folks, among whom it appeared she
+had only recently appeared as "Jeff's" bride. Having exhausted the
+Smiths, she again gave Phoebe the floor by asking:
+
+"Are you going to-night?"
+
+"Well, I should say! Don't I look it?"
+
+To determine by Phoebe's appearance where she might be going were an
+impossibility to the uninitiated, for her dress was an odd combination
+of the extremes of wretchedness and luxury. A woefully torn and
+much-soiled shirt-waist; a gorgeous gold watch worn on her breast like a
+medal; a black taffeta skirt, which, under the glue-smeared apron,
+emitted an unmistakable frou-frou; three Nethersole bracelets on her
+wrist; and her feet incased in colossal shoes, broken and stringless.
+The latter she explained to Mrs. Smith.
+
+"I just swiped a pair of paw's and brought them along this morning, or
+I'd be dished for getting into them high heels to-night. My corns and
+bunions 'most killed me yesterday--they always do break out bad about
+Easter. My pleasure club," she explained, turning to me--"my pleasure
+club, 'The Moonlight Maids,' give a ball to-night." Which fact likewise
+explained the curl-papers as well as the slattern shirt-waist, donned to
+save the evening bodice worn to the factory that morning and now tucked
+away in a big box under the table.
+
+A whole side of our pretty violet-sprinkled bower caved in as a little
+"turner-in" lurched against it in passing with a top-heavy column of
+boxes. Through the opening daylight is visible once more, and from the
+region of the machines is heard a chorus of voices singing "The Fatal
+Wedding."
+
+"Hot a--i--r!" Phoebe intones derisively. "It's a wonder Angelina
+wouldn't get a new song. Them strippers sing that 'Fatal Wedding' week
+in and week out."
+
+We worked steadily, and as the hours dragged on I began to grow dead
+tired. The awful noise and confusion, the terrific heat, the foul smell
+of the glue, and the agony of breaking ankles and blistered hands seemed
+almost unendurable.
+
+At last the hour-hand stood at twelve, and suddenly, out of the
+turmoil, a strange quiet fell over the great mill. The vibrations that
+had shaken the whole structure to its very foundations now gradually
+subsided; the wheels stayed their endless revolutions; the flying belts
+now hung from the ceiling like long black ribbons. Out of the stillness
+girl-voices and girl-laughter echoed weirdly, like a horn blown in a
+dream, while sweeter and clearer than ever rang Phoebe's soprano "Hot
+air!"
+
+The girls lunched in groups of ten and twelve. Each clique had its
+leader. By an unwritten law I was included among those who rallied
+around Phoebe, most of whom she had "learned" at some time or other, as
+she was now "learning" me. The luncheons were divested of their
+newspaper wrappings and spread over the ends of tables, on discarded
+box-lids held across the knees--in fact, any place convenience or
+sociability dictated. Then followed a friendly exchange of pickles and
+cake. A dark, swarthy girl, whom they called "Goldy" Courtleigh, was
+generous in the distribution of the lukewarm contents of a broken-nosed
+tea-pot, which was constantly replenished by application to the
+hot-water faucet.
+
+Although we had a half-hour, luncheon was swallowed quickly by most of
+the girls, eager to steal away to a sequestered bower among the boxes,
+there to lose themselves in paper-backed romance. A few of less literary
+taste were content to nibble ice-cream sandwiches and gossip. Dress, the
+inevitable masquerade ball, murders and fires, were favorite topics of
+discussion,--the last always with lowered voices and deep-drawn
+breathing. For fire is the box-maker's terror, the grim specter that
+always haunts her, and with good reason does she always start at the
+word.
+
+"I'm always afraid," declared Phoebe, "and I always run to the window
+and get ready to jump the minute I hear the alarm."
+
+"I don't," mused Angelina; "I haven't sense enough to jump: I faint dead
+away. There'd be no chance for me if a fire ever broke out here."
+
+Once or twice there was mention of beaux and "steady fellows," but the
+flesh-and-blood man of every-day life did not receive as much attention
+in this lunch chat as did the heroes of the story-books.
+
+While it was evident, of course, from scattered comments that box-makers
+are constantly marrying, it was likewise apparent that they have not
+sufficient imagination to invest their hard-working, sweat-grimed
+sweethearts with any halo of romance.
+
+Promptly at half-past twelve the awakening machinery called us back to
+the workaday world. Story-books were tucked away, and their entranced
+readers dragged themselves back to the machines and steaming paste-pots,
+to dream and to talk as they worked, hot of their own fellows of last
+night's masquerade, but of bankers and mill-owners who in fiction have
+wooed and won and honorably wedded just such poor toilers as they
+themselves.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+IN WHICH PHOEBE AND MRS. SMITH HOLD FORTH UPON MUSIC AND LITERATURE
+
+
+"Don't you never read no story-books?" Mrs. Smith asked, stirring the
+paste-pot preparatory to the afternoon's work. She looked at me
+curiously out of her shrewd, snapping dark eyes as she awaited my
+answer. I was conscious that Mrs. Smith didn't like me for some reason
+or other, and I was anxious to propitiate her. I was pretty certain she
+thought me a boresome prig, and I determined I'd prove I wasn't. My
+confession of an omnivorous appetite for all sorts of story-books had
+the desired effect; and when I confessed further, that I liked best of
+all a real, tender, sentimental love-story, she asked amiably:
+
+"How do you like 'Little Rosebud's Lovers'?"
+
+"I've never read that," I replied. "Is it good?"
+
+"It's fine," interposed Phoebe; "but I like 'Woven on Fate's Loom'
+better--don't you?" The last addressed to Mrs. Smith.
+
+"No, I can't say as that's my impinion," returned our vis-a-vis, with a
+judicious tipping of the head to one side as she soused her dripping
+paste-brush over the strips. "Not but what 'Woven on Fate's Loom' is a
+good story in its way, either, for them that likes that sort of story.
+But I think 'Little Rosebud's Lovers' is more int'resting, besides being
+better wrote."
+
+"And that's just what I don't like about it," retorted Phoebe, her
+fingers traveling like lightning up and down the corners of the boxes.
+"You like this hot-air talk, and I don't; and the way them fellows and
+girls shoot hot-air at each other in that there 'Little Rosebud's
+Lovers' is enough to beat the street-cars!"
+
+"What is it about?" I asked with respectful interest, addressing the
+question to Mrs. Smith, who gave promise of being a more serious
+reviewer than the flippant Phoebe. Mrs. Smith took a bite of gingerbread
+and began:
+
+"It's about a fair, beautiful young girl by the name of Rosebud Arden.
+Her pa was a judge, and they lived in a grand mansion in South Car'lina.
+Little Rosebud--that's what everybody called her--had a stepsister Maud.
+They was both beauties, only Maud didn't have a lovely disposition like
+Little Rosebud. A Harvard gradjate by the name of Percy Fielding got
+stuck on Little Rosebud for the wealth she was to get from her pa, and
+she was terrible stuck on him. She was stuck on him for fair, though not
+knowing he was a villain of the deepest dye. That's what the book called
+him. He talked her into marrying him clandestinely. Maud and her mother
+put up a job to get rid of Little Rosebud, so Maud could get all the
+money. So they told lies to her pa, who loved her something awful; and
+one night, when she came in after walking in the grand garden with her
+husband, who nobody knew she was married to, she found herself locked
+out. Then she went to the hotel where he was staying, and told him what
+had happened; but he turned her down flat when he heard it, for he
+didn't want nothing to do with her when she wasn't to get her pa's
+money; and then--"
+
+She stopped her cornering to inspect my work, which had not flagged an
+instant. Mrs. Smith took another bite of gingerbread, and continued with
+increasing animation:
+
+"And then Little Rosebud turned away into the night with a low cry, just
+as if a dagger had been punched into her heart and turned around slow.
+She was only sixteen years old, and she had been brought up in luxury
+and idolized by her father; and all of a sudden she found herself
+homeless, with nowheres to sleep find no money to get a room at the
+hotel, and scorned by the man that had sworn to protect her. Her pa had
+cursed her, too, something awful, so that he burst a blood-vessel a
+little while afterwards and died before morning. Only Little Rosebud
+never found this out, for she took the midnight express and came up here
+to New York, where her aunt lived, only she didn't know the
+street-number."
+
+"Where did she get the money to come to New York with?" interrupted the
+practical Phoebe. "That's something I don't understand. If she didn't
+have no money to hire a room at a hotel down in South Carolina for
+overnight, I'd like to know where she got money for a railroad ticket."
+
+"Well, that's just all you know about them swells," retorted Mrs. Smith.
+"I suppose a rich man's daughter like that can travel around all over
+the country on a pass. And saying she didn't have a pass, it's only a
+story and not true anyway.
+
+"She met a fellow on the train that night who was a villain for fair!"
+she went on. "His name was Mr. Paul Howard, and he was a corker. Little
+Rosebud, who was just as innocent as they make 'em, fell right into his
+clutches. He was a terrible man; he wouldn't stop at nothing, but he
+was a very elegant-looking gentleman that you'd take anywheres for a
+banker or 'Piscopalian preacher. He tipped his hat to Little Rosebud,
+and then she up and asked if he knew where her aunt, Mrs. Waldron,
+lived. This was nuts for him, and he said yes, that Mrs. Waldron was a
+particular lady-friend of his. When they got to New York he offered to
+take Little Rosebud to her aunt's house. And as Little Rosebud hadn't no
+money, she said yes, and the villain called a cab and they started for
+Brooklyn, him laughing to himself all the time, thinking how easily she
+was going to tumble into the trap he was getting fixed for her."
+
+"Hot air!" murmured Phoebe.
+
+"But while they were rattling over the Brooklyn Bridge, another man was
+following them in another cab--a Wall-street broker with barrels of
+cash. He was Raymond Leslie, and a real good man. He'd seen Rosebud get
+into the cab with Paul Howard, who he knew for a villain for fair. They
+had a terrible rumpus, but Raymond Leslie rescued her and took her to
+her aunt's house. It turned out that he was the gentleman-friend of
+Little Rosebud's cousin Ida, the very place they were going to. But,
+riding along in the cab, he fell in love with Little Rosebud, and then
+he was in a terrible pickle because he was promised to Ida. Little
+Rosebud's relations lived real grand, and her aunt was real nice to her
+until she saw she had hooked on to Ida's gentleman-friend; then they put
+her to work in the kitchen and treated her terrible. Oh, I tell you she
+had a time of it, for fair. Her aunt was awful proud and wicked, and
+after while, when she found that Raymond Leslie was going to marry
+Little Rosebud even if they did make a servant of her, she hired Paul
+Howard to drug her and carry her off to an insane-asylum that he ran up
+in Westchester County. It was in a lonesome place, and was full of girls
+that he had loved only to grow tired of and cast off, and this was the
+easiest way to get rid of them and keep them from spoiling his sport.
+Once a girl was in love with Paul Howard, she loved him till death. He
+just fascinated women like a snake does a bird, and he was hot stuff as
+long as he lasted, but the minute he got tired of you he was a demon of
+cruelty.
+
+"He did everything he could, when he got Little Rosebud here, to get her
+under his power. He tried his dirty best to poison her food, but Little
+Rosebud was foxy and wouldn't touch a bite of anything, but just sat in
+her cell and watched the broiled chicken and fried oysters, and all the
+other good things they sent to tempt her, turn to a dark-purplish hue.
+One night she escaped disguised in the turnkey's daughter's dress. Her
+name was Dora Gray, and Paul Howard had blasted her life too, but she
+worshiped him something awful, all the same-ee. Dora Gray gave Little
+Rosebud a lovely dark-red rose that was soaked with deadly poison, so
+that if you touched it to the lips of a person, the person would drop
+dead. She told Little Rosebud to protect herself with it if they chased
+her. But she didn't get a chance to see whether it would work or not,
+for when she heard them coming back of her after while with the
+bloodhounds barking, she dropped with terror down flat on her stummick.
+She had suffered so much she couldn't stand anything more. The doctors
+said she was dead when they picked her up, and they buried her and stuck
+a little white slab on her grave, with 'Rosebud, aged sixteen' on it."
+
+"Hot air!" from the irrepressible Phoebe.
+
+I felt that courtesy required I should agree upon that point, and I did
+so, conservatively, venturing to ask the name of the author.
+
+Mrs. Smith mentioned the name of a well-known writer of trashy fiction
+and added, "Didn't you never read none of her books?"
+
+My negative surprised her. Then Phoebe asked:
+
+"Did you ever read 'Daphne Vernon; or, A Coronet of Shame'?"
+
+"No, I haven't read them, either," I replied.
+
+"Oh, mama! Carry me out and let me die!" groaned Mrs. Smith, throwing
+down her paste-brush and falling forward in mock agony upon the smeared
+table.
+
+"Water! Water!" gasped Phoebe, clutching wildly at her throat; "I'm
+going to faint!"
+
+"What's the matter? What did I say that wasn't right?" I cried, the
+nature of their antics showing only too plainly that I had "put my foot
+in it" in some unaccountable manner. But they paid no attention.
+Mortified and utterly at sea, I watched their convulsed shoulders and
+heard their smothered giggles. Then in a few minutes they straightened
+up and resumed work with the utmost gravity of countenance and without a
+word of explanation.
+
+"What was it you was asking?" Phoebe inquired presently, with the most
+innocent air possible.
+
+"I said I hadn't read the books you mentioned," I replied, trying to
+hide the chagrin and mortification I felt at being so ignominiously
+laughed at.
+
+"Eyether of them?" chirped Mrs. Smith, with a vicious wink.
+
+"Eyether of them?" warbled Phoebe in her mocking-bird soprano.
+
+It was my turn to drop the paste-brush now. Eye-ther! It must have
+slipped from my tongue unconsciously. I could not remember having ever
+pronounced the word like that before.
+
+I didn't feel equal, then and there, to offering them any explanation or
+apologies for the offense. So I simply answered:
+
+"No; are they very good? are they as good as 'Little Rosebud's Lovers'?"
+
+"No, it ain't," said Mrs. Smith, decisively and a little contemptuously;
+"and it ain't two books, eye-ther; it's all in one--'Daphne Vernon; or,
+A Coronet of Shame.'"
+
+"Well, now I think it is," put in Phoebe. "Them stories with two-handled
+names is nearly always good. I'll buy a book with a two-handled name
+every time before I'll buy one that ain't. I was reading a good one last
+night that I borrowed from Gladys Carringford. It had three handles to
+its name, and they was all corkers."
+
+"Why don't you spit 'em out?" suggested Mrs. Smith. "Tell us what it
+was."
+
+"Well, it was 'Doris; or, The Pride of Pemberton Mills; or, Lost in a
+Fearful Fate's Abyss.' What d' ye think of that?"
+
+"It sounds very int'resting. Who wrote it?"
+
+"Charles Garvice," replied Phoebe. "Didn't you ever read none of his,
+e--y--e--ther?"
+
+"No, I must say I never did," I answered, ignoring their mischievous
+raillery with as much grace as I could summon, but taking care to choose
+my words so as to avoid further pitfalls.
+
+"And did you never read none of Charlotte M. Braeme's?" drawled Mrs.
+Smith, with remorseless cruelty--"none of Charlotte M. Braeme's,
+eye-ther?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Nor none by Effie Adelaide Rowlands, e--y--e-ther?" still persisted
+Mrs. Smith.
+
+"No; none by her."
+
+"E--y--e--ther!" Both my tormentors now raised their singing-voices into
+a high, clear, full-blown note of derisive music, held it for a brief
+moment at a dizzy altitude, and then in soft, long-drawn-out cadences
+returned to earth and speaking-voices again.
+
+"What kind of story-books do you read, then?" they demanded. To which I
+replied with the names of a dozen or more of the simple, every-day
+classics that the school-boy and-girl are supposed to have read. They
+had never heard of "David Copperfield" or of Dickens. Nor had they ever
+heard of "Gulliver's Travels," nor of "The Vicar of Wakefield." They had
+heard the name "Robinson Crusoe," but they did not know it was the name
+of an entrancing romance. "Little Women," "John Halifax, Gentleman,"
+"The Cloister and the Hearth," "Les Miserables," were also unknown,
+unheard-of literary treasures. They were equally ignorant of the
+existence of the conventional Sunday-school romance. They stared at me
+in amazement when I rattled off a heterogeneous assortment from the
+fecund pens of Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, "Pansy," Amanda M. Douglas, and
+similar good-goody writers for good-goody girls; their only remarks
+being that their titles didn't sound interesting. I spoke
+enthusiastically of "Little Women," telling them how I had read it four
+times, and that I meant to read it again some day. Their curiosity was
+aroused over the unheard-of thing of anybody ever wanting to read any
+book more than once, and they pressed me to reciprocate by repeating the
+story for them, which I did with great accuracy of statement, and with
+genuine pleasure to myself at being given an opportunity to introduce
+anybody to Meg and Jo and all the rest of that delightful March family.
+When I had finished, Phoebe stopped her cornering and Mrs. Smith looked
+up from her label-pasting.
+
+"Why, that's no story at all," the latter declared.
+
+"Why, no," echoed Phoebe; "that's no story--that's just everyday
+happenings. I don't see what's the use putting things like that in
+books. I'll bet any money that lady what wrote it knew all them boys and
+girls. They just sound like real, live people; and when you was telling
+about them I could just see them as plain as plain could be--couldn't
+you, Gwendolyn?"
+
+"Yep," yawned our vis-a-vis, undisguisedly bored.
+
+"But I suppose farmer folks likes them kind of stories," Phoebe
+generously suggested. "They ain't used to the same styles of anything
+that us city folks are."
+
+While we had been trying to forget our tired limbs in a discussion of
+literary tastes and standards, our workmates had been relieving the
+treadmill tedium of the long afternoon by various expedients. The
+quartet at the table immediately in front of us had been making inane
+doggerel rhymes upon the names of their workmates, telling riddles, and
+exchanging nasty stories with great gusto and frequent fits of wild
+laughter. At another table the forthcoming ball of the "Moonlight
+Maids" was under hot discussion, and at a very long table in front of
+the elevator they were talking in subdued voices about dreams and omens,
+making frequent reference to a greasy volume styled "The Lucky Dream
+Book."
+
+Far over, under the windows, the stripper girls were tuning up their
+voices preparatory to the late-afternoon concert, soon to begin. They
+hummed a few bars of one melody, then of another; and at last, Angela's
+voice leading, there burst upon the room in full chorus, to the rhythmic
+whir of the wheels, the melodious music and maudlin stanzas of "The
+Fatal Wedding."
+
+Phoebe lent her flute-like soprano to the next song, the rather pretty
+melody of which was not sufficient to redeem the banality of the words:
+
+
+     "The scene is a banquet where beauty and wealth
+       Have gathered in splendid array;
+     But silent and sad is a fair woman there,
+       Whose young heart is pining away.
+
+     "A card is brought to her--she reads there a name
+       Of one that she loved long ago;
+     Then sadly she whispers, 'Just say I'm not here,
+       For my story he never must know.'
+
+     "That night in the banquet at Misery Hall
+       She reigned like a queen on a throne;
+     But often the tears filled her beautiful eyes
+       As she dreamed of the love she had known.
+
+     "Her thoughts flowed along through the laughter and song
+       To the days she could never recall,
+     And she longed to find rest on her dear mother's breast
+       At the banquet in Misery Hall.
+
+     "The time passes quickly, and few in the throng
+       Have noticed the one vacant chair--
+     Till out of the beautiful garden beyond
+       A pistol-shot rings on the air.
+
+     "Now see, in the moonlight a handsome youth lays--
+       Too quickly his life doth depart;
+     While kneeling beside him, the woman he'd loved
+       Finds her picture is close to his heart."
+
+
+"What is the name of that song?" I asked when the last cadence of
+Phoebe's voice, which was sustained long after every other in the room
+was hushed, had died away.
+
+"That! Why, it's 'The Banquet in Misery Hall,'" answered Mrs. Smith,
+somewhat impatient of my unfolding ignorance. But I speedily forgot the
+rebuke in a lively interest in the songs that followed one another
+without interlude. Phoebe was counting her pile of boxes and ranging
+them into piles of twelve high; so she couldn't sing, and I,
+consequently, could not catch all the words of each song. The theme in
+every case was a more or less ungrammatical, crude, and utterly banal
+rendition of the claptrap morality exploited in the cheap story-books.
+Reduced to the last analysis, they had to do with but one subject--the
+frailty of woman. On the one side was presented Virtue tempted,
+betrayed, repentant; on the other side, Virtue fighting at bay,
+persecuted, scourged, but emerging in the end unspotted and victorious,
+with all good things added unto it.
+
+It was to me an entirely new way of looking at life; and though I
+couldn't in the least explain it to myself, it seemed, to my
+unsophisticated way of looking at such matters, that the propensity to
+break the seventh commandment was much exaggerated, and that songs about
+other subjects would have been much more interesting and not nearly so
+trying to the feelings. For the sweet voices of the singers could not
+but make the tears come to my eyes, in spite of the fact that the burden
+of the song seemed so unworthy.
+
+"You all sing so beautifully!" I cried, in honest admiration, at the
+close of one particularly melodious and extremely silly ditty. "Where
+did you learn?"
+
+Phoebe was pleased at the compliment implied by the tears in my eyes,
+and even Mrs. Smith forgot to throw out her taunting "eye-ther" as she
+stood still and regarded my very frank and unconcealed emotion.
+
+"I guess we sort of learn from the Ginney girls," explained Phoebe.
+"Them Ginneys is all nice singers, and everybody in the shop kind of
+gets into the way of singing good, too, from being with them. You ought
+to hear them sing Dago songs, oughtn't she, Gwendolyn?"
+
+"Yep," answered Gwendolyn; "I could just die hearing Angela and Celie
+Polatta singing that--what-d'ye-call-it, that always makes a body bu'st
+out crying?"
+
+"You mean 'Punchinello.' Yep, that's a corker; but, Lord! the one what
+makes me have all kinds of funny cold feelings run up my back is that
+'Ave Maria.' Therese Nicora taught them--what she says she learned in
+the old country. I wouldn't want anything to eat if I could hear songs
+like that all the time."
+
+The clock-hands over Annie Kinzer's desk had now crept close to the hour
+of six, and Angela had only begun the first stanza of--
+
+
+     "Papa, tell me where is mama," cried a little girl one day;
+     "I'm so lonesome here without her, tell me why she went away.
+     You don't know how much I'm longing for her loving
+       good-night kiss!"
+     Papa placed his arms around her as he softly whispered this:
+
+     "Down in the City of Sighs and Tears, under the white
+       light's glare,
+     Down in the City of Wasted Years, you'll find your mama there,
+     Wandering along where each smiling face hides its story of
+       lost careers;
+     And perhaps she is dreaming of you to-night, in the City of Sighs
+      and Tears."
+
+
+The machinery gave a ponderous throb, the great black belts sagged and
+fell inert, the wheels whirred listlessly, clocks all over the great
+city began to toll for one more long day ended and gone, while the
+voices of the girl toilers rose superbly and filled the gathering
+stillness with the soft crescendo refrain:
+
+
+     "Wandering along where each smiling face hides its story of
+       lost careers;
+     And perhaps she is dreaming of you to-night, in the City of
+       Sighs and Tears--
+     In the City of Sighs and Tears."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+IN WHICH I ACQUIRE A STORY-BOOK NAME AND MAKE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF MISS
+HENRIETTA MANNERS
+
+
+Before entering upon my second day's work at the box-factory, and before
+detailing any of the strange things which that day brought forth, I feel
+it incumbent upon me to give some word of explanation as to my
+whereabouts during the intervening night. It will be remembered that
+when I left the factory at the end of the first day, I had neither a
+lodging nor a trunk. I will not dwell upon the state of my feelings when
+I walked out of Thompson Street in the consciousness that if I had been
+friendless and homeless before, I was infinitely more so now. I will say
+nothing of the ache in my heart when my thoughts traveled toward the
+pile of ruins in Fourteenth Street, with the realization of my
+helplessness, my sheer inability even to attempt to do a one last humble
+little act of love and gratitude for the dead woman who had been truly
+my friend.
+
+Briefly stated, the facts are these: I had, all told, one dollar, and I
+walked from Thompson Street straight to the Jefferson Market
+police-station, which was not a great distance away. I stated my case to
+the matron, a kindly Irishwoman. I was afraid to start out so late in
+the evening to look for a lodging for the night. I would have thought
+nothing of such a thing a few weeks previous, but the knowledge of life
+which I had gained in my brief residence in Fourteenth Street and from
+the advice of Mrs. Pringle had showed me the danger that lurked in such
+a course. The police matron said my fears were well founded, and she
+gave me the address of a working-girls' home over on the East Side,
+which she said was not the pleasantest place in the world for a
+well-brought-up girl of refinement and intelligence, such as she took me
+to be, but was cheap, and in which I would be sure of the protection
+which any young, inexperienced woman without money needs so badly in
+this wicked city. She wrote down the address for me, and I had started
+to the door of her little office when her motherly eye noticed how
+fagged out and lame I was--and indeed I could scarcely stand--and with a
+wave of her plump arm she brought me back to her desk.
+
+"Why don't you stay here with me to-night?" she asked. "You needn't
+mind; and if I was you I would do it and save my pennies and my tired
+legs. You can have a bite of supper with me, and then bundle right off
+to bed. You look clean tuckered out."
+
+So to my fast-growing list of startling experiences I added a night in
+the station-house; but a very quiet, uneventful night it was, because
+the matron tucked me away in her own little room. That is, it was quiet
+and uneventful so far as my surroundings were concerned, though I slept
+little on account of my aching bones. All night I tossed, pain-racked
+and discouraged; for, after all the long, hard day's work of the day
+before, Phoebe's card had only checked one dollar and five cents, which
+represented two persons' work. Such being the case, how could I expect
+to grow sufficiently skilful and expeditious to earn enough to keep body
+and soul together in the brief apprenticeship I had looked forward to?
+Unable to sleep, I was up an hour earlier than usual, and after I had
+breakfasted--again by the courtesy of the matron--I was off to work long
+before the working-day began.
+
+I had thought to be the first arrival, but I was not. A girl was already
+bending over her paste-pot, and the revelers of the "Ladies' Moonlight
+Pleasure Club" came straggling in by twos and threes. Some of the weary
+dancers had dropped to sleep, still wearing their ball-gowns and
+slippers and bangles and picture-hats, their faces showing ghastly white
+and drawn in the mote-ridden sunbeams that fell through the dirty
+windows. Others were busy doffing Cinderella garments, which rites were
+performed with astounding frankness in the open spaces of the big loft.
+
+"Oh, Henrietta, you had ought to been there," Georgiana gushed, dropping
+her lace-trimmed petticoats about her feet and struggling to unhook her
+corsets. "It was grand, but I'm tired to death; and oh, dear! I've
+another blow-out to-night, and the 'Clover Leaf' to-morrow night!" With
+a weary yawn, the society queen departed with her finery.
+
+"You didn't go to the ball?" I suggested to the girl addressed as
+Henrietta, and whom I now recalled as one who had worked frantically all
+the day before.
+
+"Me? No. I don't believe in dancing," she replied, without looking up.
+"Our church's down on it. I came early to get ahead with my order. You
+can do more work when there's not so many round."
+
+Such strict conformity to her religious scruples, combined with such
+pathetic industry, seemed to augur well for the superior worth of this
+tall, blonde, blue-eyed girl. I was anxious to make a friend of her,
+and accordingly proffered my services until Phoebe should come to claim
+me. She accepted gladly, and for the first time looked up and rewarded
+me with a smile. I caught a glimpse of an unprepossessing
+countenance--despite rather good features and fine hair--the most
+striking characteristics of which were a missing front tooth and lips
+that hung loose and colorless.
+
+As we worked, the conversation became cordial. She inquired my name, and
+I repeated the plain, homely Scotch-Irish cognomen that had been handed
+down to me by my forefathers.
+
+"Why don't you get a pretty name?" she asked, in a matter-of-fact tone.
+"All the girls do it when they come to the factory to work. It don't
+cost no more to have a high-sounding name."
+
+Much interested, I protested, half in fun, that I didn't know any name
+to take, and begged her to suggest one. She was silent for a moment.
+
+"Well, last night," she went on--"last night I was reading a story about
+two girls that was both mashed on the same feller. He was rich and they
+was poor and worked, and one of them was called 'Rose Fortune.'"
+
+"That's a very pretty name," I remarked.
+
+"Isn't it, though? Rose Fortune--ever so much prettier than your own.
+Say, why don't you take it, and I'll begin calling you by it right
+away."
+
+"And what's your name?" I ventured.
+
+"Mine? Oh, mine's Henrietta Manners; only," she added hastily--"only
+that's my real name. I was born with it. Now most of the girls got
+theirs out of story-books. Georgiana Trevelyan and Goldy Courtleigh and
+Gladys Carringford and Angelina Lancaster and Phoebe Arlington--them
+girls all got theirs out of stories. But mine's my own. You see," and
+she drew near that no other ear might hear the secret of her proud
+birth--"you see, Manners was my mother's name, and she ran away and
+married my papa against her rich father's wishes. He was a banker. I
+mean mama's papa was a banker, but my papa was only a poor young
+gentleman. So grandfather cut her off without a cent in his will, but
+left everything to me if I would take the name of Manners."
+
+The heroine of this strange romance stopped for breath, and if I had
+cherished any doubts of the truth of her story in the beginning, at
+least I was sure now that she believed it all herself; one glance into
+her steady blue eyes, in which a telltale moisture was already
+gathering, was proof of that.
+
+"No, indeed," continued Miss Manners: "I haven't always been a
+working-girl. I used to go to boarding-school. I thought I'd be a
+governess or something, and once I tried to learn bookkeeping, but my
+eyes give out, and the figures mixed up my brain so, and then I got sick
+and had to come to this box-factory. But I'm the first Manners that ever
+worked."
+
+I was now thoroughly ashamed of my first unjust suspicions that
+Henrietta might not be strictly truthful, and I inquired with sincere
+interest as to the fate of her ill-starred family.
+
+"All dead and sleeping in our family vault," she replied wistfully. "But
+don't let us talk anything more about it. I get so worked up and mad
+when I talk about the Mannerses and the way they treated me and my poor
+parents!"
+
+The threatened spell with Henrietta's nerves was averted by a sudden
+turning on of the power, and the day's work began. Phoebe did not appear
+to claim me, and I worked away as fast as I could to help swell
+Henrietta's dividends.
+
+"I guess you can stay with her the rest of the day," Annie Kinzer said,
+stopping at the table. "The 'Moonlight Maids' must have been too much
+for Phoebe. Guess she won't show up to-day."
+
+Henrietta was naturally delighted with the arrangement, which would add
+a few pennies to her earnings. "I only made sixty cents yesterday, and I
+worked like a dog," she remarked. "It was a bad day for everybody. We
+ought to make more than a dollar to-day. Phoebe says you're a hustler."
+
+Our job was that of finishing five hundred ruching-boxes. Henrietta
+urged me frequently to hurry, as we were away behind with the order. I
+soon discovered that for all her Manners blood and alleged gentle
+breeding, she was a harder taskmaster than the good-natured but plebeian
+Phoebe. Her obvious greed for every moment of my time, for every
+possible effort of my strength and energy, I gladly excused, however,
+when she revealed the fact that all her surplus earnings went toward the
+support of a certain mission Sunday-school in which she was a teacher.
+The conversation drifted from church matters to my own personal affairs.
+
+"Isn't it awful lonesome living alone in a room?"
+
+"How did you know I lived in a room?" I inquired in surprise, with the
+uncomfortable feeling that I had been the subject of ill-natured gossip.
+
+"Oh, Annie Kinzer told me. Say, I wouldn't tell her anything about my
+affairs. She's an awful clack."
+
+We were silent for a moment, while I wondered if Henrietta, if Annie
+Kinzer, if any girl in all the world could ever guess how lonely I had
+been every moment since I had come to this great city to work and to
+live. Then came the unexpected.
+
+"Wouldn't you like to come and room with me?"
+
+"With you?" I was half pleased, half doubtful.
+
+"Yes. I've got plenty of room."
+
+"Perhaps I couldn't afford it."
+
+"Yes, you can. I don't put on style. It won't cost us more than a dollar
+and a half a week for each--rent, eating, and everything else. I was
+thinking, as you're a learner, it will be a long time before you can
+make much, and you'd be glad to go halvers with somebody. Two can always
+live cheaper than one."
+
+A dollar and a half a week! That was indeed cheaper than I had been
+living. I had something less than two dollars in my purse, and pay-day,
+for me, was still a week off.
+
+And so I accepted the proposition, and by lunch-time the news was all
+over the factory that the new girl was to be Henrietta's room-mate.
+Annie Kinzer--everybody, in fact--approved, except, possibly, Emma. Emma
+was a homely, plainly dressed girl who had worked ten years here at
+Springer's. She bore the reputation of being a prudey and a kill-joy.
+Thus far she had never deigned to look at me, but now she took occasion
+to pass the time of day when we met at the water-faucet, and asked, in a
+doubtful tone, how long I had known Henrietta Manners.
+
+Meanwhile we "cornered" and "tissued" and "laced" and "labeled." Higher
+and higher grew our pasteboard castle, which we built as children pile
+up brightly colored blocks. At eleven Henrietta sent me below for
+trimmings.
+
+"How do you like your job?" asked the young fellow who filled my order.
+This was strictly conventional, and I responded in kind. While Charlie
+cut tapes and counted labels, he made the most of his opportunity to
+chat. Dismissing, with brief comment, the weather and the peculiar
+advantages and disadvantages of box-making as a trade, he diplomatically
+steered the talk along personal and social lines by suggesting, with a
+suppressed sigh, the probability that I should not always be a
+box-maker. I replied heartily that I hoped not, which precipitated
+another question: "Is the day set yet?" My amused negative to the query,
+and intimation that I had no "steady," were gratefully received, and
+warranted the suggestion that, as a matter of course, I liked to go to
+balls.
+
+"My pleasure club has a blow-out next Sunday night," he remarked
+significantly, as I gathered up my trimmings and departed.
+
+During my five minutes' absence the most exciting event of the day had
+occurred. Adrienne, one of the strippers, had just been carried away,
+unconscious, with two bleeding finger-stumps. In an unguarded moment the
+fingers had been cut off in her machine. Although their work does not
+allow them to stop a moment, her companions were all loud in sympathy
+for this misfortune, which is not rare. Little Jennie, the unfortunate
+girl's turner-in and fellow-worker for two years, wept bitterly as she
+wiped away the blood from the long, shining knife and prepared to take
+the place of her old superior, with its increased wage of five dollars
+and a half a week. The little girl had been making only three dollars
+and a quarter, and so, as Henrietta remarked, "It's a pretty bad
+accident that don't bring good to somebody."
+
+"Did they take her away in a carriage?" Henrietta asked of Goldy
+Courtleigh, who had stopped a moment to rest at our table.
+
+"Well, I should say! What's the use of getting your fingers whacked off
+if you can't get a carriage-ride out of it?"
+
+"Yes, and that's about the only way you'd ever squeeze a carriage-ride
+out of this company," commented Henrietta. "Now I've two lady-friends
+who work in mills where a sick headache and a fainting-spell touch the
+boss for a carriage-ride every time!"
+
+The order on which we worked was, like most of the others on the floor
+that day, for late-afternoon delivery. Our ruching-boxes had to be
+finished that day, even though it took every moment till six or even
+seven o'clock. Saturday being what is termed a "short-day," one had to
+work with might and main in order to leave at half-past four. This
+Henrietta was very anxious to do, partly because she had her Easter
+shopping to do, and partly because this was the night I was to be
+installed in my new quarters. Lunch-time found us still far behind.
+Therefore we did not stop to eat, but snatched bites of cake and
+sandwich as hunger dictated, and convenience permitted, all the while
+pasting and labeling and taping our boxes. Nor were we the only toilers
+obliged to forgo the hard-earned half-hour of rest.
+
+The awakening thunder of the machinery burst gratefully on our ears. It
+meant that the last half of the weary day had begun. How my blistered
+hands ached now! How my swollen feet and ankles throbbed with pain!
+Every girl limped now as she crossed the floor with her towering
+burden, and the procession back and forth between machines and tables
+began all over again. Lifting and carrying and shoving; cornering and
+taping and lacing--it seemed as though the afternoon would never wear to
+an end.
+
+The whole great mill was now charged with an unaccustomed excitement--an
+excitement which had in it something of solemnity. There was no sign of
+the usual mirth and hilarity which constitute the mill's sole
+attraction. There was no singing--not even Angelina's "Fatal Wedding."
+No exchange of stories, no sallies. Each girl bent to her task with a
+fierce energy that was almost maddening in its intensity.
+
+Blind and dizzy with fatigue, I peered down the long, dusty aisles of
+boxes toward the clock above Annie Kinzer's desk. It was only two. Every
+effort, human and mechanical, all over the great factory, was now
+strained almost to the breaking-point. How long can this agony last? How
+long can the roar and the rush and the throbbing pain continue until
+that nameless and unknown something snaps like an overstrained
+fiddle-string and brings relief? The remorseless clock informed us that
+there were two hours more of this torture before the signal to "clean
+up"--a signal, however, which is not given until the last girl has
+finished her allotted task. At half-past two it appeared hopeless even
+to dream of getting out before the regular six o'clock.
+
+The head foreman rushed through the aisles and bawled to us to "hustle
+for all we were worth," as customers were all demanding their goods.
+
+"My God! ain't we hustling?" angrily shouted Rosie Sweeny, a pretty girl
+at the next table, who supplied most of the profanity for our end of the
+room. "God Almighty! how I hate Easter and Christmas-time! Oh, my legs
+is 'most breaking," and with that the overwrought girl burst into a
+passionate tirade against everybody, the foreman included, and all the
+while she never ceased to work.
+
+There were not many girls in the factory like Rosie. Hers were the
+quickest fingers, the sharpest tongue, the prettiest face. She was
+scornful, impatient, and passionate--qualities not highly developed in
+her companions, and which in her case foreboded ill if one believed
+Annie Kinzer's prophecy: "That Rosie Sweeny 'll go to the bad yet, you
+mark my words."
+
+Three o'clock, a quarter after, half-past! The terrific tension had all
+but reached the breaking-point. Then there rose a trembling,
+palpitating sigh that seemed to come from a hundred throats, and
+blended in a universal expression of relief. In her clear, high treble
+Angelina began the everlasting "Fatal Wedding." That piece of false
+sentiment had now a new significance. It became a song of deliverance,
+and as the workers swelled the chorus, one by one, it meant that the end
+of the day's toil was in sight.
+
+By four o'clock the last box was done. Machines became mute, wheels were
+stilled, and the long black belts sagged into limp folds. Every girl
+seized a broom or a scrub-pail, and hilarity reigned supreme while we
+swept and scrubbed for the next half-hour, Angelina and her chorus
+singing all the while endless stanzas of the "Fatal Wedding."
+
+Henrietta sent me for a fresh pail of water, which I got from the faucet
+in the toilet-room; and as I filled my bucket I made a mental inventory
+of my fellow-toilers' wardrobes. Hanging from rows of nails on all sides
+were their street garments--a collection of covert-cloth jackets, light
+tan automobile coats, black silk box-coats trimmed in white lace,
+raglans, and every other style of fashionable wrap that might be cheaply
+imitated. Sandwiched among the street garments were the trained skirts
+and evening bodices of the "Moonlight Maids" of the night before, and
+which were to be again disported at some other pleasure-club festivity
+that Easter evening, now drawing near. Along the walls were ranged the
+high-heeled shoes and slippers, a bewildering display of gilt buckles
+and velvet bows; each pair waiting patiently for the swollen, tired feet
+of their owner to carry them away to the ball. The hats on the shelf
+above were in strict accord with the gowns and the cloaks and the
+foot-gear--a gorgeous assortment of Easter millinery, wherein the
+beflowered and beplumed picture-hat predominated.
+
+I hurried back with my bucket of water, hoping in my heart that the
+pleasure their wearers got out of this finery might be as great as the
+day's work which earned it was long and hard. And so indeed it must have
+been, if Henrietta was any authority on such questions.
+
+"I love nice clothes, even if I do have to work hard to get them," she
+remarked, as we turned into Bleecker Street a few minutes later, four
+one-dollar bills safely tucked away in her stocking. "But say, you ought
+to see my new hat. It's elegant," and drawing my arm through hers, my
+new room-mate hurried me through the Saturday-evening crowd of
+homeward-bound humanity.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+WHEREIN I WALK THROUGH DARK AND DEVIOUS WAYS WITH HENRIETTA MANNERS
+
+
+It had been an ideal day for March--a day touched with pale-yellow
+sunshine in which one felt the thrill and the promise of the springtime,
+despite the chill east wind.
+
+Into the murky, evil-smelling squalor of Thompson Street this shy
+primrose sunshine had poured in the earlier part of the afternoon; but,
+being a north-and-south thoroughfare, it had all filtered out by
+half-past four, only to empty itself with increased warmth and glory
+into the east-and-west cross-streets, leaving Thompson dim and cold by
+comparison when Henrietta Manners and I emerged from Springer's.
+
+Henrietta wore a dusty picture-hat of black velvet with a straight
+ostrich feather and streamers of soiled white tulle, and a shabby
+golf-cape of blue and white check which was not quite long enough to
+conceal the big brass safety-pins with which her trained skirt was
+tucked up, and which she had forgotten to remove until we had gone some
+yards down the street. While we stopped long enough for her to perform
+this most important sartorial detail, my eye traversed the street before
+us, which with a gentle descent drops downward and stretches away toward
+the south--a long, dim, narrow vista, broken at regular intervals by
+brilliant shafts of gold streaming from the sunlit cross-streets, and
+giving to the otherwise squalid brick-walled canyon the appearance of a
+gay checkered ribbon. But if the March sunshine had deserted Thompson
+Street, the March winds still claimed it as their own. Up and down they
+had swept all day, until the morning mud on the cobblestones had been
+long dried up and turned to dust, which now swirled along, caught up in
+innumerable little whirlwinds that went eddying down the street.
+
+Grabbing up her demi-train in her bare hand, Henrietta and I also eddied
+down the street and were lost to view for a few moments in the whirlwind
+which struck us at the crowded corner of Bleecker Street.
+
+This whirlwind was the result partly of physical and partly of human
+forces. For it was Saturday night, and life was running at flood-tide
+all over the great city. Always tempestuous, always disturbed with the
+passion and pain and strife of its struggle to maintain the ground it
+had gained, never for one brief moment calm, even at its lowest
+ebb--now, on this last night of the long, weary week, all the currents
+and counter-currents of the worker's world were suddenly released. At
+the stroke of bell, at the clang of deep-mouthed gong, at the scream of
+siren whistle, the sluice-gates were lifted from the great human
+reservoirs of factory and shop and office, and their myriad toilers
+burst forth with the cumulative violence of six days' restraint.
+
+It was a shabby carnival of nations that jostled one another at this
+windy corner--Italian, Spanish, German, Slav, Jew, Greek, with a
+preponderance of Irish and "free-born" Americans. The general air was
+one of unwonted happiness and freedom. The atmosphere of holiday liberty
+was vibrant with the expectation of Saturday-night abandon to fun and
+frolic or wild carousal.
+
+For "the ghost had walked" through the workaday world that day, and
+everybody had his "envelop" in his pocket. It is a pleasant sensation to
+feel the stiff-cornered envelop tucked safely away in your vest pocket,
+or in the depths of your stocking, where Henrietta had hidden hers safe
+out of the reach of the wily pickpocket, who, she told me, was lurking
+at every corner and sneaking through every crowd on that Saturday
+evening, which was also Easter Eve.
+
+Easter Eve! I had almost forgotten the fact which accounted for this
+more than usual activity on the part of the hurrying crowds, and for the
+unmistakable holiday air which Bleecker Street displayed. As far as we
+could see, lined up on both sides of the curb were the pushcart
+peddlers, and at every step a sidewalk fakir, all crying their Easter
+wares.
+
+Henrietta lingered first about one pushcart, then about another, opening
+her gaudy side-bag, then shutting it resolutely and marching on,
+determined not to succumb to the temptation to squander her hard-earned
+pennies. She succeeded admirably until we came upon a picturesque
+Italian and his wife who were doing a flourishing business from a
+pushcart piled high with sacred images. Henrietta showed a lively
+interest in the cut prices at which they were going: ten cents for St.
+Peter in a scarlet robe and golden sandals; fifteen cents for St. John
+in purple; and only twenty-five for the Blessed Virgin in flowing blue
+clasping the Holy Babe.
+
+They were "dirt-cheap," Henrietta declared, as we watched the plaster
+casts pass over the heads of the crowd, out of which by and by emerged
+our shopmate, little Angela, clasping a Madonna under her arm and
+counting her change.
+
+The three of us resumed our homeward walk together, without any comment
+until Angela had satisfied herself about the correctness of her change.
+
+"What a slop you are!" remarked Henrietta, as her critical eye swept
+over the undeveloped little figure in the long, greasy black-taffeta
+coat, which, flapping open in front, disclosed the pasty surface of a
+drabbled blue skirt. "Why don't you never turn your skirt, Angela?"
+
+"Oh, what's the dif?" replied Angela. "There ain't no fellows going to
+look at me any more now."
+
+This reply, commonplace enough, might have passed unnoticed had there
+not been a note of tragedy in her deep contralto voice.
+
+"Why, what's the matter?" I asked.
+
+"Don't you know?" she demanded, scowling at Henrietta's silly, vacant
+"tee-hee."
+
+"Know? Know what?" I asked.
+
+"That I'm a grass-widow."
+
+"A grass-widow!" I echoed in astonishment, and looked upon the childish
+creature in sheer unbelief--for child I had always considered her. "Why,
+how old are you, anyway, Angela?"
+
+"Fifteen--I mean I'm 'most fifteen."
+
+"And you're really married!" I exclaimed again, quite aghast and
+altogether innocent of the construction which Angela immediately put
+upon the qualifying adverb.
+
+"Well, if you don't believe me look at that!" she cried, and stuck out a
+tiny, dirty hand, with finger-nails worn to the quick, and decorated
+with a gold band broad enough and heavy enough to have held a woman ten
+times Angela's weight and size in the bands of indissoluble matrimony;
+"I was married for fair, and I was married lawful. A priest did it."
+
+"Oh, I didn't mean to question that," I hastened to apologize with some
+confusion. "Only you seemed so very young, I thought you were just
+joking me."
+
+"Well, it's no joke to be married and have a baby, specially when you've
+got to s'port it," returned the girl, her lips still pouting.
+
+"And you've a baby, too--you!"
+
+The bedraggled little prima donna nodded; the pout on the lips blossomed
+into a smile, and a look of infinite tenderness transformed the tired,
+dark little face. "It's up to the creche--that's where I'm going now.
+The ladies keeps it awful good for me."
+
+"And it's such a lovely baby, too!" declared Henrietta, softly. "I seen
+it once."
+
+"She's cute; there's no lie 'bout that," assented the little mother.
+"Look what I bought her--here, you hold this Peter a minute--Henrietta,
+just hang on to the Holy Virgin," and thrusting them into our hands, she
+opened the box under her arm and drew forth a gaily painted hen that
+clucked and laid a painted egg, to the uproarious delight of Henrietta.
+
+Henrietta meanwhile had begun counting the change in her side-bag.
+
+"I don't never like to break a bill unless I've got to," she remarked,
+returning the Holy Virgin to Angela's arms; "but I'm going to have one
+of them chickens too," and away she went after the fakir. A moment later
+she emerged from the crowd with a little brown box under her arm, and we
+three continued our walk westward along Bleecker, dropping little Angela
+at the corner of the street which was to lead her to the day-nursery
+where she would pick up her baby and carry it home.
+
+"That was a 'fatal wedding' for fair, wasn't it?" I remarked, as my eyes
+followed the little figure.
+
+But my companion paid no attention to my attempt to be facetious, if
+indeed she heard the remark at all. She seemed to be deep in a brown
+study, and several times I caught her watching me narrowly from the
+corner of her eye. I was already beginning to have some misgivings as
+to the temperamental fitness of my strange "learner" and new-found
+friend as a steady, day-in-and-day-out person with whom to live and eat
+and sleep. And this feeling increased with every block we covered, for
+by and by I found myself studying Henrietta in the same furtive manner
+as she was evidently studying me.
+
+At last, when we had exchanged the holiday gaiety and the sunshine of
+Bleecker Street for a dark, noisome side-street, she broke out
+explosively:
+
+"Hope to God you ain't going to turn out the way my last room-mate did!"
+
+"Why? What did she do?"
+
+"Went crazy," came the laconic reply, and she shivered and drew the old
+golf-cape more closely about her shoulders; for the damp of the dark,
+silent tenements on either side seemed to strike to the marrow.
+Something in her manner seemed to say, "Ask no more questions," but
+nevertheless I pursued the subject.
+
+"Went crazy! How?"
+
+"I d'know; she just went sudden crazy. She come to Springer's one day
+just like you, and she said how she was wanting to find a place to board
+cheap; and she was kind of down in the mouth, and she come home with me;
+and all of a sudden in the night I woke up with her screamin' and going
+on something fearful, and I run down and got the Dago lady in the
+basement to come up, and her man run for the police. They took her away
+to the lock-up in the hurry-up wagon, and the next day they said she was
+crazy,--clean crazy,--and she's in the crazy-house over on the Island
+now."
+
+"What island?" I asked, not with any desire to know this minor detail,
+but because I was too disturbed for the moment to make any other
+comment. It seemed to Henrietta, however, a most senseless question, for
+she remarked rather testily:
+
+"Why, just the Island, where they send all the crazy folks, and the
+drunks, and the thieves and murderers, and them that has smallpox."
+
+"Mercy! what an awful place it must be!" I cried. "And that's where the
+poor girl went?"
+
+"That's where she went--say, tell me honest now, didn't you run away?"
+
+"Run away! Where from?"
+
+"Run away from home--now didn't you?"
+
+"Mercy, no! What put such an idea as that in your head?" I asked,
+laughing.
+
+"Fanny Harley did."
+
+"Who's Fanny Harley?"
+
+"She's the girl they took to the crazy-house."
+
+"But," I argued, "is that any reason for you to suppose that I ran away
+from home too?"
+
+"Yep, it is. You're ever so much like Fanny Harley. You talk just alike,
+and you've got just the same notions she had, from what I can make; and
+she did run away from home. She told me so. She lived up-state
+somewhere, and was off a farm just like you; and--"
+
+"But I'm not a farmer, and never was," I put in.
+
+"Why, you told me yourself you was born in the country, didn't you?" and
+I saw there was no use trying to point out to Henrietta the difference
+between farmers and those born in the country, both of which were terms
+of contempt in her vocabulary. We were still threading the maze of
+strange, squalid streets which was to lead us eventually to the former
+brief abiding-place of Fanny Harley; and, filled with curiosity
+regarding my own resemblance to my unfortunate predecessor, I revived
+the subject by asking carelessly:
+
+"How is it I talk and act that makes me like Fanny Harley?"
+
+"Well, you 've got a kind of high-toned way of talking," she explained.
+"I don't mind the way you talk, though,--using big words and all that.
+That ain't none of our business, I tell the girls; but you do walk so
+funny and stand so funny, that it is all I can do to keep from bu'stin'
+out laughing to see you. And the other girls says it's the same with
+them, but I told them it was because you was just from the country, and
+that farmers all walk the same way. But really, Rose,--you're getting
+used to that name, ain't you?--you ought to get yourself over it as
+quick as you can; you ain't going to have no lady-friends in the factory
+if you're going to be queer like that."
+
+"But I walk as I always did. How else should I walk? How do I walk that
+makes me so funny?" I asked, mortified at the thought of my having been
+the butt of secret ridicule. Henrietta was cordial in her reply.
+
+"You walk too light," she explained; "you don't seem to touch the ground
+at all when you go along, and you stand so straight it makes my back
+ache to watch you."
+
+Then my mentor proceeded to correct my use and choice of diction.
+
+"And what makes you say 'lid' when you mean a cover? Why, it just about
+kills us girls to hear you say 'lid.'"
+
+"But," I remonstrated, aggravated by her silly "tee-hee" into defense of
+my English, "why shouldn't I say 'lid' if I want to? It means just the
+same as cover."
+
+"Well, if it mean the same, why don't you say 'cover'?" my "learner"
+retorted, with ill-disguised anger that I should question her authority;
+and I dropped the subject, and the remainder of the walk was continued
+in silence.
+
+It was growing more and more apparent that I had not made a wise
+selection in my room-mate, but it seemed too late to back out now--at
+least until I had given her a trial of several days.
+
+I felt as though I had obtained, as if by magic, a wonderfully
+illuminating insight into her nature and character during this short
+walk from the factory. I had thought her at the work-table a
+kind-hearted, honest toiler, a bit too visionary, perhaps, to accord
+with perfect veracity, and woefully ignorant, but with an ignorance for
+which I could feel nothing but sorrow and sympathy, as the inevitable
+result of the hard conditions of her life and environment. But now I
+recognized with considerable foreboding, not only all this, but much
+more besides. Henrietta Manners, that humble, under-fed, miserable
+box-maker, was the very incarnation of bigotry and intolerance, one by
+whom any idea, or any act, word, or occurrence out of the ordinary rut
+set by box-factory canons of taste and judgment, must be condemned with
+despotic severity. And yet, in the face of all these unpleasant
+reflections upon poor Henrietta's unbeautiful mental characteristics, I
+felt a certain shamefaced gratitude toward the kind heart which I knew
+still beat under that shabby golf-cape.
+
+Meanwhile, Henrietta had again lapsed into a silent, sullen mood, as she
+pitched along in the nervous, jerky, heavy-footed gait which she had
+urged me to emulate, and which I thought so hideous. I did not know
+then, but I do know now, that such gait is invariably a characteristic
+of the constitution in which there is not the proper coordination of
+muscular effort. In the light of knowledge gained in later years, I can
+now see in that long, slouching, shuffling figure, in that
+tallow-colored face with the bloodless, loose lips and the wandering,
+mystic eyes of periwinkle blue--I can see in that girl-face framed by a
+trashy picture-hat, and in that girl-form wrapped in the old golf-cape,
+one of the earth's unfortunates; a congenital failure; a female creature
+doomed from her mother's womb--physically, mentally, and morally doomed.
+
+I was, however, on this memorable Easter Eve most happily innocent of my
+Lombroso and my Mantagazza, else I had not been walking home with
+Henrietta Manners, in all the confidence of an unsophisticated
+country-girl. So much confidence did I have in my shop-mate that I did
+not yet know the name of the street on the West Side where my future
+home was, nor did I know any of the strange, dark, devious paths by
+which she led me through a locality that, though for the most part
+eminently respectable, is dotted here and there, near the river-front,
+with some of the worst plague-spots of moral and physical foulness to be
+found in New York.
+
+In later and more prosperous years I have several times walked into
+Thompson Street, and from that as a starting-point tried to retrace our
+walk of that night, bordering along old Greenwich Village, but as well
+have tried to unravel the mazes of the Cretan Labyrinth.
+
+The last westward street we traversed, dipping under the trellis of an
+elevated railroad, led straight into a lake of sunset fire out of which
+the smoking funnels of a giant steamship lying at her dock rose dark and
+majestic upon the horizon.
+
+A little cry of admiration escaped me at sight of the splendid picture,
+and I hoped secretly that our way might continue to the water's edge;
+but instead, reaching the line of the elevated, we turned in and
+followed the old, black street above which the noisy trains ran. The
+street itself presented the appearance of a long line of darkened
+warehouses, broken occasionally by a dismal-looking dwelling, through
+the uncurtained windows of which we could see slattern housewives busy
+getting supper.
+
+It was the most miserable and squalid of all the miserable and squalid
+streets I had thus far seen, and it had the additional disadvantage of
+being practically deserted of everything save the noise and smoke
+overhead. There were no foot-passengers, no human sounds. It was all so
+hideous and fearsome that after five minutes' walk I was not surprised
+to see Henrietta select the most wretched of all the wretched houses as
+the one we should enter. As we climbed the high stoop, I could see,
+through the interstices of rusted ironwork that had once been handsome
+balusters, the form of an Italian woman sitting in the basement window
+beneath, nursing a baby at her breast.
+
+"That's the lady what come up to help hold Fanny Harley," my room-mate
+remarked as we passed inside.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+INTRODUCING HENRIETTA'S "SPECIAL GENTLEMAN-FRIEND"
+
+
+"Say! ain't you got no special gentleman-friend?"
+
+Henrietta's voice, breaking a pregnant silence, startled me so that I
+nearly jumped off the empty soap-box where for some minutes I had sat
+watching her bend over a smoking skillet of frying fat.
+
+An answer was not to be given unadvisedly, such was the moral effect of
+the question. It hadn't been asked in a casual way, but showed, by its
+explosive form of utterance, that it was the result not so much of a
+pent-up curiosity as of a careful speculation as to the manner in which
+I would receive it. So I tried to look unconscious, and at this critical
+juncture the thunder of an elevated train came adventitiously to my
+rescue and gave me a few moments in which to consider what I should
+reply. And as I considered unconsciously my eye took in an inventory of
+the room. The heavily carved woodwork hinted of the fact that it had
+once been a lady's bedchamber in the bygone days when this was a
+fashionable quarter of New York, and its spaciousness and former
+elegance now served rather to increase the squalor as well as to
+accentuate the barrenness of its furnishings. The latter consisted of
+two wooden boxes, one of which I sat upon; an empty sugar-barrel, with a
+board laid across the top; a broken-down bed in an uncurtained alcove; a
+very large, substantial-looking trunk, iron-bound and brass-riveted; and
+last, but not least, a rusty stove, now red-hot, which might well have
+been the twin sister of my own "Little Lottie" at the ill-fated
+Fourteenth-street house. This stove, connected with the flue by a small
+pipe, fitted into what had once been a beautiful open fireplace, but
+which was now walled up with broken bricks, and surmounted by a mantel
+of Italian marble sculptured with the story of Prometheus's boon to
+mankind, and supported on either end by caryatides in the shape of
+vestal virgins bearing flaming brands in their hands. Overhead the
+ceiling showed great patches of bare lath, where the plaster had fallen
+away, and the uncarpeted floor was strewn with bread-crumbs and marked
+by a trail of coal-siftings from the stove to a closet-door from which
+the fire was replenished. The door to the closet was gone, and in its
+recess a pair of trousers hung limply, while Henrietta's scant wardrobe
+was ranged along the black-painted wall outside. The long, cobweb-hung
+windows, bare of blind or curtain, showed a black-mirrored surface
+against the batten shutters.
+
+All these details I could descry but dimly by the light of the smoking
+oil-lamp that sat on the mantelshelf above the stove, and which cast a
+ghastly light upon a row of empty bottles--the sole burden of the once
+spotless, but now sadly soiled, vestal virgins.
+
+Henrietta was bending over the smoking skillet, with the lamp-light
+falling across her pale face. As she boiled the coffee and fried the
+eggs I studied her profile sketched against the blue, smoky background,
+and tried in vain to grasp the secret of its fleeting, evanescent
+beauty. For beautiful Henrietta was--beautiful with a beauty quite her
+own and all the more potent because of its very indefinableness. I
+watched her as one horribly fascinated,--that high, wide white forehead,
+that weak chin, those soft, tremulous lips, on which a faint smile would
+so often play, and those great, wide eyes of blue that now looked purple
+in the lamp-light. And then, gradually, I saw, as I watched, an
+expression I had never seen there before; the wavering suggestion of the
+smile left the lips and they fell apart, loose and bloodless, with a
+glimpse of the missing front tooth. It was an expression that lasted but
+the fraction of a second, but it stamped her whole countenance with
+something sinister.
+
+Then Henrietta lifted the eggs, carried the coffee-pot across to the
+table, which was none other than the board-capped barrel, and went back
+for the lamp. All these things she insisted upon doing herself, just as
+she had stubbornly refused to allow me to help with the cooking of the
+supper.
+
+Setting the lamp down upon the improvised table, she threw open one of
+the shutters to let in a breath of fresh air, and as she did so the room
+was filled with the roar and dust of the elevated train which passed so
+close to our windows, and after it came a cold draft of air caused by
+the suction of the cars. Henrietta closed the window and returned to the
+table.
+
+Then I answered her question: "Well, that depends upon what you mean by
+gentleman-friend," I said.
+
+"I mean just what I said," replied Henrietta, sliding an egg upon her
+plate and passing the remaining one to me. "I mean a _special_
+gentleman-friend."
+
+"Well, no; I guess I haven't. I used to know lots of boys in the country
+where I lived, but there isn't one of them I could call my special
+gentleman-friend, and I don't know any men here." I uttered this speech
+carefully, so as not to imply any criticism of Henrietta's use of the
+expression "gentleman-friend," nor to call down upon my own head her
+criticism for using any other than the box-factory vernacular in
+discussing these delicate amatory affairs.
+
+"Oh, go and tell that to your grandmother!" she retorted, with a sly
+little laugh. "Don't none of the girls there have gentlemen-friends, or
+is farmers so different that they never stand gentlemen-friends to
+them?"
+
+"Oh, dear me, yes!" I answered hastily, trying to avoid the unpleasant
+_double entendre_, and choosing to accept it in its strictly explicit
+phase. "Why, certainly, the girls get married there every day. There are
+hardly any old maids in my part of the country. They get engaged almost
+as soon as they are out of short dresses, and the first thing you know,
+they are married and raising families." Then I added, "but have you got
+a gentleman-friend yourself?"
+
+"Yep," she answered, nodding and pouring out the coffee; "I have a very
+particular gentleman-friend what's been keeping company with me for
+nearly a year, off and on."
+
+"Oh!" I cried, eager to turn the conversation toward Henrietta's
+personal affairs instead of my own, which I felt she completely
+misconstrued. "Do tell me about him; what is his name--and are you
+engaged to him yet?"
+
+"My! ain't you fresh, though?" she said; but there was cordiality in the
+rebuff. "I met him at the mission where I teach Sundays," she went on.
+"He's brother Mason, and he's the Sunday-school superintendent. He give
+me all that perfume on the mantel," and she pointed a dripping knife
+toward the row of empty bottles.
+
+"Why, is he in the perfumery business?" I asked innocently, my eyes
+ranging over the heterogeneous collection on the mantel. Henrietta took
+the remark as exceedingly funny, for she immediately fell into a
+paroxysm of tittering, choking over a mouthful of food before she could
+attain gravity enough to answer.
+
+"Lord! no; you do ask the funniest questions!"
+
+Thus checked, I did not press for further information as to brother
+Mason's vocation, but proceeded to satisfy my hunger, which was not
+diminished by the unappetizing appearance of the food on the barrel.
+
+It was a matter of great surprise to me to see how little Henrietta ate,
+and I was likewise ashamed of my own voracious appetite. Henrietta
+noticed this and frowned ominously.
+
+"God! but you do eat!" she commented frankly, poising her knife in air.
+
+"I'm hungry. I've worked hard to-day," I replied with dignity.
+
+"Maybe you won't eat so much, though, after a while," she said
+hopefully.
+
+"Maybe not," I agreed. "But you, Henrietta--you are not eating
+anything!"
+
+"Me? Oh, I'm all right. I'm eating as much as I ever do. The works takes
+away my hunger. If it didn't, I don't know how I'd get along. If I eat
+as much as you, I'd be likely to starve to death. I couldn't make enough
+to feed me. When I first begun to work in the factory I'd eat three or
+four pieces of bread across the loaf, and potatoes and meat, and be
+hungry for things besides; but after a while you get used to being
+hungry for so long, you couldn't eat if you had it to eat."
+
+"How long have you been working?" I ventured.
+
+Henrietta put her cup on the table and shot a suspicious glance at me
+before she answered:
+
+"Oh, off and on, and for five or six years, ever since my uncle died. He
+was my guardian--that's his house up there."
+
+I looked in the direction of Henrietta's pointed finger to a cheap
+chromolithograph that was tacked on the wall between the windows and
+immediately over the barrel where we were eating. I recognized it at
+once as a reproduction of a familiar scene showing a castle on the
+Rhine. I had seen the same picture many times, once as a supplement with
+a Sunday newspaper. That this stately pile of green and yellow
+variegated stones should be the residence of Henrietta's uncle and
+guardian seemed obviously but a bit of girlish fun, of a piece with her
+earlier talk regarding her aristocratic ancestry; for by this time I had
+construed that strange story into a hoax that was never meant to be
+taken seriously.
+
+But one glance now at Henrietta's face showed me my mistake. It was
+plainly to be seen that she had come to believe every word of what she
+had told me.
+
+My eye had traveled to the row of garments on the pegs behind the door
+and had rested with curiosity upon a "lassie" bonnet and cloak.
+Henrietta did not wait for the question on my lips.
+
+"Them's my adjutant's uniform," she said, with a touch of pride. "You
+didn't know I used to be an adjutant in the Salvation Army, did you?"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"Well, I was, all right. Adjutant Faith Manners, that's what I was," and
+rising, she limped across the floor, and burrowing in the depths of the
+trunk, returned in a moment with an envelop which she handed me with the
+command to read its contents. The envelop, postmarked "Pittsburg, Pa.,"
+was addressed to Adjutant Faith Manners.
+
+"But how does it come you have two names?" I inquired.
+
+"Well," the girl replied slowly, "I thought as how it sounded better for
+a professing Christian to have some name like that, than Henrietta.
+Henrietta is kind of fancy-sounding, specially when you was an adjutant
+officer and was supposed to have give yourself to Jesus."
+
+I read the letter; it was a curious epistle, written in a beautiful,
+flowing hand, well worded, and complimenting Adjutant Manners upon her
+"persistence in the good work for Jesus," and winding up with the offer
+of a small post, at a salary to be determined later on, in the Pittsburg
+barracks of the Salvation Army. The name of the writer, which for
+obvious reasons it is best not to divulge, was that of an officer who, I
+have since discovered, is well and favorably known in Pittsburg. The
+whole thing was a bewildering paradox. There was no doubt of its being a
+bona-fide letter, nor of Adjutant Faith Manners and my room-mate being
+one and the same person. And yet, how explain the ludicrous
+inconsistency of such an experience in the life of such a girl?
+
+I had opened my mouth to ask some question to this end, when we started
+as a heavy step resounded in the hallway outside. Then the latch
+rattled, the door swung open, and a thick-set, burly, bearded man stood
+upon the threshold. I screamed before I noticed that Henrietta regarded
+the new-comer quite as a matter of course.
+
+The man stood in the doorway, evidently surprised for the moment at
+seeing me there; then, closing the door behind him, he advanced
+awkwardly, tiptoeing across the floor, and sat down upon the edge of the
+bed without so much as a word.
+
+"Will you have a cup of coffee, brother Mason?" asked Henrietta,
+shaking the pot to determine whether its contents would warrant the
+invitation.
+
+"I don't care if I do, sister Manners," returned brother Mason, removing
+his hat as if it were an afterthought, and drawing forth a large red
+handkerchief with which he mopped his forehead and thick red neck.
+
+"This is my lady-friend, Rose Fortune," said Henrietta as she drained
+the coffee-pot, and nodding first to the visitor, then to myself; "my
+gentleman-friend, brother Mason."
+
+Brother Mason had risen and tiptoed forward, his hands thrust into the
+bulging pockets of his overcoat, whence he proceeded gravely to draw
+forth and deposit upon the barrel-top a heterogeneous love-offering, as
+follows: two oranges; a box of mustard; a small sack of nutmegs; a box
+of ground pepper; a package of allspice; a box containing three dozen
+bouillon capsules; a bottle of the exact size and label as the
+innumerable empty vessels on the mantel; a package of tea done up in
+fancy red-and-gold paper; and, last, a large paper sack of pulverized
+coffee.
+
+Henrietta now handed a cup to the donor of these gifts, which he
+accepted meekly and carried on tiptoe back to his place on the edge of
+the bed.
+
+Brother Mason drank his coffee with a great deal of unnecessary noise,
+while Henrietta gathered up the dishes, after again rebuffing me almost
+rudely for presuming to offer my services. Thus there was nothing left
+for me to do, apparently, but to sit on the soap-box and look at brother
+Mason, who regarded me in rather sheepish fashion over the top of his
+cup.
+
+I judged him to be a good-natured man on the near side of fifty. His
+close-cropped hair was an iron-gray, and his stubby beard and mustache a
+fierce red, the ferocity of which was tempered by the mildness of
+deep-set, small blue eyes. His general appearance would, I thought, have
+been more in accord with the driver of a beer-truck than anything so
+comparatively genteel as driving a grocer's wagon--his occupation, I
+discovered, which explained the source of his offerings to Henrietta.
+Despite the burliness of brother Mason, there was that about him which
+rather encouraged confidence than aroused suspicion, although it was
+difficult to reconcile him with the superintendence of a mission
+Sunday-school. The latter incongruity had just popped into my mind when
+he broke the silence by asking in a deep guttural, and with a vigorous
+nod in my direction as he put down his empty cup:
+
+"Ha! Cat'lic?"
+
+"Oh, no," I answered, eager to break the embarrassing silence--"oh, no;
+I'm a Protestant."
+
+"Ha! But you be Irish, ben't you?"
+
+I laughed. "No; American!"
+
+"Ha! Father and mother Irish, mebbe?"
+
+"No, they were American, too; but my great-great-grandfather
+and-grandmother were Irish."
+
+"Aye, that's it! I knowed you was Irish the minute I seen them red
+cheeks, eh! sister Manners?" chuckled brother Mason in a rich brogue,
+rubbing his hands and looking across at my room-mate, who had been
+apparently oblivious to our conversation, as she washed and wiped the
+dishes out of a tin basin which I recognized as that from which we had
+washed our hands and faces after we got home from work. She now fixed
+the visitor with her periwinkle eyes, and replied severely:
+
+"I ain't got nothing to say against my lady-friend's looks, as you
+certainly know, brother Mason."
+
+Something in this answer--no doubt, a hint of smothered jealousy--made
+brother Mason throw his hand to his mouth and duck his head as he darted
+a sly look toward me. But I met the look with a serious face, and indeed
+I felt serious enough without getting myself into any imbroglio with
+this strange pair of lovers.
+
+"You're Irish, I suppose, Mr. Mason?" I asked when he had recovered his
+gravity after this mirth-provoking incident.
+
+"Me? I'm from County Wicklow, but I ain't no Cat'lic Irish. I'm a
+Methody. Cat'lic in the old country, Methody here. Got converted twenty
+years ago at one of them Moody and Sankey meetings--you've heard tell of
+Moody and Sankey, mebbe? Eh? Ha!"
+
+These latter ejaculations the Catholic apostate repeated alternately and
+with rhythmic precision as he proceeded to press tobacco into a clay
+pipe with numerous deft movements of his large red thumb, regarding me
+fixedly all the while.
+
+"Yes, yes," I repeated many times, but not until he had lighted the pipe
+and drawn a deep whiff of it did brother Mason choose to regard his
+question as answered.
+
+"Well, it was them that brought me to the mourners' bench, for fair. It
+was Moody and Sankey that did the damage; and I've got to say this much
+for them gentlemen, I've never seen the day I was sorry they did it. I'm
+the supe of a mission Sunday-school now, meself; and I've done me dirty
+best to push the gospel news along." Here he turned to Henrietta. "Be
+your lady-friend coming over to-morrow afternoon, sister Manners?"
+
+"I don't hinder her, nor nobody's, doing what they like!" answered
+Henrietta, again with that air of severity, not to say iciness, in her
+manner; and I shifted myself uncomfortably on the box as I met her
+glance of patient scorn. She had now finished her dish-washing, and
+seated herself upon the edge of the box, which brother Mason had already
+appropriated with his large, clumsy bulk.
+
+"Come now, you do care, ye know you care!" he said gruffly, as he threw
+an arm carelessly across the girl's shoulder and patted her kindly; the
+scowl immediately left her face and her head dropped upon his brawny,
+red-shirted breast and snugly settled itself there, much to my
+embarrassment. Then, between long-drawn whiffs of the rank-smelling
+pipe, brother Mason descanted upon himself and his achievements,
+religious, social, financial, and political, with no interruption save
+frequent fits of choking on the part of poor Henrietta, whom even the
+clouds of rank smoke could not drive from her position of vantage.
+
+Brother Mason, so he informed me, was not only an Irishman and a
+Methodist, but a member of Tammany Hall and a not unimportant personage
+in the warehouses of the wholesale grocers for whom he drove the
+delivery wagon, and from whom, I now haven't a doubt in the world, he
+had stolen for the benefit of his lady-love many such an offering of
+sweet perfume and savory spice as he had carried her that Easter Eve. I
+found his talk eminently entertaining, with the charm that often goes
+with the talk of an unlettered person who knows much of life and of men.
+He was densely ignorant from the schoolmaster's point of view, and
+openly confessed to an inability to write his name; but his ignorance
+was refreshing, as the ignorance of man is always refreshing when
+compared with the ignorance of woman; which fact, it has often appeared
+to me, is the strongest argument in favor of the general superiority of
+the male sex. For hidden somewhere within brother Mason's thick, bullet
+head there seemed to be that primary germ of intelligence which was
+apparently lacking in the fair head snuggled on his breast. It was
+therefore with a mingled feeling of relief and regret that, after a
+couple of hours of conversation, I saw him gently push Henrietta away
+and announce his departure,--relief from the embarrassment which this
+open love-making had caused me, and regret that I was once more to be
+left alone with Henrietta in that dark, cavernous house. It was then
+after midnight, and Henrietta suggested, as brother Mason drew on his
+overcoat, that she accompany him as far as the corner saloon, where she
+wanted to buy a quarter-pint of gin; and they went off together, leaving
+me alone.
+
+When their resounding footsteps had died away down the stairs, I picked
+up the lamp and walked about, examining the shadowy corners of the room,
+peering into the black abyss of the alcove where the unwholesome bed
+stood, and not neglecting, like the true woman I was, to look underneath
+and even to poke under it with the handle of a broom. I raised the
+windows and threw open the batten-shutters, and through the darkness
+tried to measure the distance to the street below. Not only that, but I
+also speculated upon being able to climb out upon the railroad tracks,
+should the worst come to the worst.
+
+What worst? What did I fear? I don't know. I did not exactly know then,
+and I scarcely know now. It may have been the promptings of what is
+popularly termed "woman's intuition." No more do I know why I then and
+there resolved that I should sleep with my shoes and stockings on; and
+further, if possible, I determined to keep awake through the long night
+before me.
+
+I closed the windows and returned to a further inspection of the room,
+stopping before the open trunk to examine some of the many books it
+contained. One by one I opened and examined the volumes; a few of them
+were romances of the Laura Jean Libbey school of fiction, but the
+majority were hymnals inscribed severally on the fly-leaf with the names
+"Faith Manners," "Hope Manners," "Patience Manners." Across the room the
+bottles on the mantel shone vaguely in the shadow. I carried the lamp
+over, and placing it in the little cleared-out space among them, began
+to examine the bottles with idle curiosity. "Wild Crab Apple," "Jockey
+Club," "Parma Violet," "Heliotrope," I read on the dainty labels,
+lifting out the ground-glass corks and smelling the lingering fragrance
+which yet attached to each empty vial. Of these there must have been two
+dozen or more.
+
+And there were other bottles, also empty, but not perfume-bottles. Of
+these others there were more than a dozen. At first I did not quite
+comprehend the purport of the printing on their labels, and it was not
+until I had studied some half a dozen of them that the sickening horror
+of their meaning dawned upon me fully. There was no mistaking them; the
+language was too unblushingly plain. They were the infamous nostrums of
+the malpractitioner; and in the light of this loathsome revelation there
+was but one thing for me to do: I had to get out of that room, and
+before Henrietta should return; and so, grabbing up my hat and jacket, I
+rushed in a panic out of the awful place into the midnight blackness of
+the empty street.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+IN WHICH I FIND MYSELF A HOMELESS WANDERER IN THE NIGHT
+
+
+In making my escape I had not counted upon my chances of meeting
+Henrietta returning from the saloon. I had thought of nothing but to get
+as far away as possible from the horror of it all. Dashing headlong down
+the street, I was going I knew not where, when suddenly Henrietta's
+vacuous "tee-hee" rang out in the darkness and echoed among the iron
+girders of the elevated trestle; and, looking ahead of me, I saw her in
+the light of the corner gas-jet coming toward me, a man on either side
+of her, and all three evidently in the best of spirits. I sank back into
+the darkness of a doorway that stood open, motionless until they had
+passed and their voices had died away.
+
+In the few minutes of waiting, I had collected my wits sufficiently to
+determine upon a plan of action. I would find my way back to the
+Jefferson Market, and stay there until daylight, and then go to the
+Working Girls' Home recommended by the police matron.
+
+But no sooner had I determined on this plan, which was really the only
+thing I could have done, than I heard women's voices close at hand; and
+before I could creep out of the doorway, two figures, groping up to it
+through the darkness, dropped down upon the threshold. They muttered and
+mumbled to each other for a little while, then their deep breathing told
+me they had fallen into a doze.
+
+Again and again I had crept out of my hiding-place, looked at the two
+bowed, crouching figures, which I could see only in vague outline, and
+then withdrew again into the comparative safety of the black hallway. I
+hesitated to waken them, and I could not creep over them asleep--not
+until I heard the low, guttural voice of a drunken man in the darkness
+above, and the uncertain shuffle of feet feeling their way to the head
+of the staircase. Then, my heart in my mouth, quite as much for the fear
+of what was before me as for what was fumbling about in the darkness
+behind, I came boldly out and stood over the huddled figures. Now I saw
+that they were old women, very old, and both fast asleep, with their
+arms locked about each other for protection against the cold. Both were
+bare-headed and scantily dressed, and each wore a little wisp of gray
+hair drawn into a button at the back of her head, just as Mrs. Pringle
+had worn hers. I touched the nearest bundle on the shoulder. She awoke
+with a start, and peered around at me with a pitiful whimper. I
+explained that I only wanted to pass, and that she would oblige me very
+much to allow me to do so.
+
+"You want to git out, do ye, dearie? Well, you jist shall git out," came
+the rejoinder in a high, quavering voice, and slowly the old woman
+lifted herself, with many groans and "ouches" for her stiffened joints.
+
+"Dearie! dearie! I thought ye wuz the cop," the old crone went on, as
+she grasped my arm in a hand whose thinness I could feel through my thin
+jacket. "A nice arm it is ye have got, and yit ye don't speak as if ye
+be one of we uns, be you?" The withered hand held me as though in a
+vise, while I could feel the gin-laden breath of the unfortunate
+creature as she peered close into my face.
+
+"Please--please let me go!" I whispered, for I could hear the stumbling
+footsteps within near the bottom of the stairs. "Please let me go! I
+must go to the drug-store to find a doctor; some one is sick."
+
+"Sure, dearie, sure!" and the thin fingers relaxed their hold. "Do ye
+know where the drug-store is? and mightn't I make bold enough to ask to
+go with ye? It's late for a lady to be out, with the streets full of
+drunks and lazy longshoremen; and I know you _be_ a lady."
+
+I was in a quandary. Naturally I did not want to accept this drunken
+woman's offer to pilot me, and yet I really had not the heart to offend
+the old creature, for there was genuine sympathy betrayed in her voice
+at the mention of sickness. She seemed to take my silence for
+acceptance, however; and placing her arm on mine, conducted me down the
+dark street. At the corner we passed under a gas-lamp, when we saw each
+other distinctly for the first time. She was dark and swarthy, with
+deep-set black eyes, and her thin, coarse, bristling gray hair, I
+noticed, was full of wisps of excelsior and grass box-packing. She was
+about sixty-two or-three, and had a spare, brawny frame with heavy,
+stooped shoulders. Evidently she had taken just as careful an inventory
+of my appearance, for we had not gone far before she was giving me all
+manner of good advice about taking care of myself in a big, wicked city,
+with repeated asseverations that she always knew a lady when she saw
+one, and that if I wasn't one of that enviable species, then her name
+wasn't Mrs. Bridget Reynolds; and the latter being "a proper married
+woman and the mother of a family all dead now, God rest their souls!"
+who should know a lady better than she? And why was Mrs. Bridget
+Reynolds, a proper married and equally proper widowed woman of her
+reverend years, sitting upon a doorstep at three o'clock of a cold March
+morning? Och! God bless ye, just a little trouble with the landlord, no
+work for several weeks, and a recent eviction; a small matter that had
+often happened before, and was like as not to happen ag'in, God willing!
+And who was Mrs. Bridget Reynolds's sleeping mate left behind on the
+doorstep? Divil a bit did Mrs. Bridget Reynolds know about her, only
+that she had found her that night in the empty warehouse, where she had
+gone like herself to sleep, among the packing-cases, under the straw and
+excelsior, which made a bed fit for a queen, and where they might still
+have been taking their ease had not a heartless cop chased them out, bad
+luck to him!
+
+Such was the gist of Mrs. Reynolds's discourse. I have not the courage
+to attempt to transcribe her rich brogue and picturesque phraseology;
+and even were I able to do so, it could give the reader no adequate idea
+of the wealth of optimism and cheerfulness that throbbed in her
+quavering voice. Hers could be a violent tongue, too, as the several
+men who accosted us on our dark way discovered at their first approach
+to familiarity; and on one occasion, when a drunken sailor leered up to
+my side, Mrs. Bridget spat at him like an angry tabby-cat. Somehow, I no
+longer felt afraid under her protection and guidance.
+
+At last, after a very long walk, we came in sight of the brightly
+lighted windows of a drug-store, and Mrs. Reynolds said we were on
+Bleecker Street. I had now to explain that my asking the way to a
+drug-store had been merely a bit of subterfuge, which I did in fear and
+trembling as to how Mrs. Reynolds would accept such deception on my
+part. But she was all good humor.
+
+"Sure, dearie, it's all right! I'm glad to do a good turn for yez, being
+as you're a poor body like mesilf, even if ye air a lady!"
+
+We were now standing in the glare of the big colored-glass carboys in
+the drug-store window at the corner of Bleecker Street and some one of
+its intersecting alleys. It was now four in the morning, and the streets
+were almost deserted. My companion smiled at me with the maudlin
+tenderness which gin inspires in the breast of an old Irishwoman, and as
+we stood irresolute on the corner I noticed how thinly clad she was.
+The sharp wind wrapped her calico skirt about her stiffened limbs, and
+her only wrap was a little black knitted fascinator which did not meet
+over the torn calico blouse.
+
+"A wee nip of gin would go right to the spot now, wouldn't it, dearie?"
+the old soul asked wistfully, which reminded me of something I had
+forgotten: that I still had my precious dollar and a half snugly stowed
+away in my petticoat pocket. So I suggested that we go to a lunch-room
+and have a good meal and a cup of hot coffee, and sit there till
+daylight, which now was not far off.
+
+The prospect of something to eat and something hot to drink infused
+great cheerfulness into my strange chaperon; she grasped my arm with the
+gaiety of a school-girl, and we walked eastward until we came to a dairy
+lunch-room upon the great plate-glass windows of which was enameled in
+white letters a generous bill of fare at startlingly low prices. The
+place was of the sort where everybody acts as his own waiter, buying
+checks for whatever he wants from the cashier and presenting them at a
+long counter piled up with eatables. Mrs. Reynolds was modesty itself in
+accepting of my bounty.
+
+When we had finished it was daylight, and I parted from my duenna at the
+door, she with innumerable terms of maudlin endearment, and an
+invocation to all the saints in the calendar that they should keep a
+kindly eye upon me. As to my own feelings, I felt heartless to be
+obliged to leave the poor creature with nothing more than a
+twenty-five-cent piece, and with no proffer of future help--if, indeed,
+she was not beyond help. But I was powerless; for I was as poor as she
+was. I had suggested her applying to the authorities for aid, but she
+had received it scornfully, even indignantly, declaring that Mrs.
+Bridget Reynolds would die and rot before she'd be beholden to anybody
+for charity. Anything in the shape of organized authority was her
+constitutional enemy, and the policeman was her hereditary foe.
+Hospitals were nefarious places where the doctors poisoned you and the
+nurses neglected you in order that you should die and furnish one more
+cadaver to the dissecting-rooms; almshouses were the last resort of the
+broken in heart and spirit, institutions where unspeakable crimes were
+perpetrated upon the old and helpless. Therefore, was it any wonder this
+independent old dame of Erin preferred deserted warehouses and dark
+doorways as shelter?
+
+And so, early in this Easter morning, I left Mrs. Bridget Reynolds at
+the door of the Bleecker Street lunch-room, she to go her way and I to
+go mine. I looked back when I had got half a block away, and she was
+still standing there, apparently undetermined which way to turn. I
+watched a moment, and presently she ambled across the street and rattled
+the door of the "ladies'" entrance to the saloon on the corner. Then I
+turned my face toward the reddening east, against which the shabby
+housetops and the chimneys and the distant spires and smokestacks
+stretched out in a broken, black sky-line. I was going to find the home
+for working girls which the good matron at Jefferson Market had
+recommended, and the address of which I still had in the bottom of my
+purse.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+I BECOME AN "INMATE" OF A HOME FOR WORKING GIRLS
+
+
+The spirit of the early Easter Day had breathed everywhere its own
+ineffable Sabbath peace, and when at last I emerged into Broadway, it
+was to find that familiar thoroughfare strangely transformed. On the six
+days preceding choked with traffic and humming with ten thousand noises,
+it was now silent and deserted as a country lane--silent but for the
+echo of my own footsteps upon the polished stone flagging, and deserted
+but for the myriad reflections of my own disheveled self which the great
+plate-glass windows on either side of the street flashed back at me.
+
+My way lay northward, with the spire of Grace Church as a finger-post.
+Grace Church had become a familiar landmark in the preceding weeks, so
+often had I walked past it in my hopeless quest, and now I approached it
+as one does a friend seen suddenly in a crowd of strangers. The fact
+that I was approaching an acquaintance, albeit a dumb and unseeing one,
+now made me for the first time conscious of my personal appearance so
+persistently reflected by the shop windows. Before one of them I stopped
+and surveyed myself. Truly I was a sorry-looking object. I had not been
+well washed or combed since the last morning at Mrs. Pringle's house;
+for two days I had combed my long and rather heavy hair with one of the
+small side-combs I wore, and on neither morning had I enjoyed the luxury
+of soap. And two successive mornings without soap and the services of a
+stout comb are likely to work all sorts of demoralizing transformations
+in the appearance of even a lady of leisure, to say nothing of a girl
+who had worked hard all day in a dirty factory.
+
+Fortunately the street was deserted. I stepped into the entrance of a
+big, red-sandstone building, and standing between the show-windows, took
+off my hat, laid it on the pavement, and proceeded to unroll my hair and
+slick it up once more with the aid of the side-comb, of which I had now
+only one left, having lost the other somewhere in my flight from
+Henrietta's. That I should have thought to put on my hat in preparing
+for that flight I do not understand, for I forgot my gloves, a
+brand-new pair too; my handkerchief; and, most needful of all else, my
+ribbon stock-collar, without which my neck rose horribly long and thin
+above my dusty jacket-collar. Looking at it ruefully, I began to feel
+for the first time what was for me at least the very quintessence of
+poverty--the absolute impossibility of personal cleanliness and of
+decent raiment. I had known hunger and loneliness since I had come to
+New York, but never before had I experienced this new, this infinitely
+greater terror--lack of self-respect. That I had done nothing to lower
+my self-respect had nothing whatever to do with it, since self-respect
+is often more a matter of material things than of moral values. It is
+possible for a hungry woman to walk with pride, and it is possible for
+the immoral and utterly degraded woman to hold her own with the best of
+her sisters, when it comes to visible manifestation of self-respect, if
+only she is able to maintain her usual degree of cleanliness and good
+grooming. But unacquainted with soap for two days! and without a collar!
+How could I ever summon courage to present myself to anybody in such a
+condition? Had I been an old woman, I mightn't have cared. But I was a
+girl; and, being a girl, I suffered all of a girl's heartache and
+melancholy wretchedness when I remembered that it was Sunday and that
+there was no hope of buying either collar or comb for twenty-four
+hours--if, indeed, I dared to spend any of my few remaining dimes and
+nickels for these necessities, which had suddenly soared to the heights
+of unattainable luxuries.
+
+In the full consciousness of my disreputable appearance, I hung in the
+doorway, reluctant to fare forth in the cruel light of the thoroughfare.
+Hitherto I had had the street all to myself, so it had not mattered so
+much how I looked. But now an empty car hurtled by, its gong breaking
+for the first time the silence of the long vista stretching away and
+dipping southward to the Battery. Then another car came speeding along
+from the opposite direction, whirled past Grace Church, and northward
+around the curve at Fourteenth Street; and following in the wake of the
+car, a hansom-cab with a jaded man and woman locked in each other's arms
+and fast asleep. As the latter passed close to the curb, I drew into the
+embrasure of the door as far as possible so as to avoid being seen by
+the cabman--as if it made the least difference whether he saw me or not;
+but such is the all-absorbing self-consciousness and vanity of girlhood.
+It was then that I noticed for the first time the glaring sign that had
+been staring at me during all these ineffectual attempts to "primp."
+
+"Wanted--Girls to learn flower-making. Paid while learning. Apply Monday
+morning at nine o'clock."
+
+I repeated the street-number over and over, so as to make sure of
+remembering it; and then, screwing up my courage, walked hurriedly up
+the street, trying to ignore the glances which were cast at me by
+occasional pedestrians. I happened to think of a large dairy lunch-room
+on Fourteenth Street where I had several times gone for coffee and
+rolls, and where the cashier and waitresses knew me by sight, and where
+I thought, by investing in a cup of coffee, I might tidy up a bit in the
+toilet-room. If only the place should be open on Sunday morning!
+
+And it was. The cashier had just stepped into her cage-like desk, and
+the waitresses were lined up in their immaculate white aprons and lace
+head-dresses. I was their first customer, apparently. The cashier, a
+pretty, amiable girl, suppressed any surprise she may have felt at my
+appearance, and greeted me with the same dazzling smile with which she
+greeted every familiar face. I explained to her what I wanted to do,
+apologizing for my slovenliness. She was all sympathetic attention, her
+eyes snapped with good-humored interest, and she told me to go back and
+take all the time I wanted to wash up. In a few minutes she sent me, by
+one of the waitresses, a fresh piece of soap, a comb, a bit of
+pumice-stone, a whisk-broom, a nail-file, a pair of curved
+nail-scissors, a tiny paper parcel containing some face-powder, and,
+wonder of wonders, a beautifully clean, fresh, shining collar!
+
+Before the big, shimmering mirrors I washed and splashed to my heart's
+content and to the infinite advantage of my visage. How delicious it was
+to see and hear and feel the clear, hot water as it rushed from the
+silver faucet into the white porcelain bowl! I washed and I washed, I
+combed and I combed, until there was absolutely no more excuse for doing
+either; then I powdered my face, just enough to take the shine off,
+filed my finger-nails, brushed my clothing, put on my borrowed collar,
+and stepped out into the eating-room, feeling, if not looking, like the
+"perfect lady" which the generous-hearted cashier declared I resembled
+"as large as life."
+
+"Never mind about the collar; you can just keep it," she said when I
+returned her toilet articles. "It's not worth but a few cents, anyway,
+and I've got plenty more of them.... Don't mention it at all; you're
+perfectly welcome. I didn't do anything more for you than I'd expect
+you to do for me if I was in such a pickle. If we working girls don't
+stand up and help one another, I'd like to know who's going to do it for
+us.... So long!"
+
+"So long!" It was not the first time that I had heard a working girl
+deliver herself of that laconic form of adieu, and heretofore I had
+always execrated it as hopelessly vulgar and silly, which no doubt it
+was and is. But from the lips of that kind-hearted woman it fell upon my
+ears with a sort of lingering sweetness. It was redolent of hope and
+good cheer.
+
+The home for working girls I found, not very far away from this
+lunch-room, in one of the streets south of Fourteenth Street and well
+over on the East Side. It was a shabby, respectable, unfriendly-looking
+building of red brick, with a narrow, black-painted arched door. On the
+cross-section of the center panel was screwed a silver plate, with the
+name of the institution inscribed in black letters, which gave to the
+door the gruesome suggestion of a coffin set on end.
+
+A polite pull at the rusty handle of the bell-cord brought no response,
+and I rang again, a little louder. A chain was rattled and a bolt drawn
+back. The lid of the black coffin flew open, disclosing, with the
+suddenness of a jack-in-the-box, a withered old beldam with a large
+brass key clutched in a hand that trembled violently with palsy.
+
+She grumbled inarticulately, and with a jerk of her head motioned me
+into a small room opening off the hall, while she closed and locked the
+door with the great brass key.
+
+The little reception-room, or office, was no more cheerful than the
+front door, and, like it, partook somewhat of an ecclesiastical aspect.
+Arranged in a sort of frieze about the room were a series of framed
+scriptural texts, all of which served to remind one in no ambiguous
+terms of the wrath of God toward the froward-hearted and of the eternal
+punishment that awaits unrepentant sinners. And then, at intervals, the
+vindictive utterances were broken by pictures--these, too, of a
+religious or pseudo-religious nature.
+
+One of these pictures particularly attracted my attention. It was
+entitled "Hope leaning upon Faith," and showed an exceedingly
+sentimental young girl leaning heavily upon an anchor, her eyes lifted
+heavenward, where the sun was just breaking through black clouds, and
+all against a perspective of angry sea. I was trying to apply its
+symbolism to my own case, when a sharp, metallic voice inquired
+abruptly:
+
+"What did you wish?"
+
+I turned about quickly. A tall, hard-faced woman of forty or thereabouts
+stood in the door, and looked at me coldly through spectacles that
+hooked behind ears the natural prominence of which was enhanced by her
+grayish hair being drawn up tightly and rolled into a "bun" on the very
+top of the head. She was the personification of neatness, if such be the
+word to characterize the prim stiffness of a flat-figured, elderly
+spinster. She wore large, square-toed, common-sense shoes, with low
+heels capped with rubber cushions, which, as I was shortly to discover,
+had earned for the lady the sobriquet of "Old Gum Heels." What her real
+name was I never found out. Nobody knew. She was the most hated of all
+our tormentors; and in all of the weeks I was to remain in the house
+over which she was one of the supervisors, I never heard her referred to
+by any other than the very disrespectful cognomen already quoted. But I
+am anticipating.
+
+"I would like to get board here," I replied timidly, for the very manner
+of the woman had in it an acid-like quality which bit and burned the
+sensibilities like vitriol does the flesh.
+
+"Have you any money?"
+
+"Not very much."
+
+"How much?" she demanded.
+
+"About one dollar."
+
+"What baggage have you?"
+
+"None," I replied, and related as well as my embarrassment would allow
+me the story of the fire and of my flight from Henrietta, not forgetting
+the generosity of the cashier in the dairy lunch-room. She listened in
+silence, and when I had finished I thought I saw the repression of a
+smile, which may or may not have been of the sardonic order. Then she
+motioned me to follow her through the long, gloomy hall to the rear of
+the house, where, turning an angle, we came to a staircase down which a
+flood of sunlight streamed from the big window on the landing. The
+sunlight showed walls of shimmering whitewashed purity and unpainted
+oaken stairs scoured white as a bone. "Old Gum Heels" stopped here, and
+was beginning to give me directions for finding the matron's room on the
+floor above, when a door at the back opened and a very little girl
+appeared with a very large pitcher of hot water, which she held tight in
+her arms as though it were a doll, jiggling at every step a little of
+the contents upon the floor.
+
+"Julia, take this girl along with you to Mrs. Pitbladder's room, and
+tell her that she wishes to make arrangements about board and lodging."
+And then to me: "Mrs. Pitbladder is the matron. You will pay your money
+to her, and she will tell you the rules and regulations for
+inmates.--And then, Julia, hurry back to the kitchen; I'll need you
+right away."
+
+"Yes, ma'am," replied the child, timidly, with a shy glance at me as she
+proceeded laboriously up the stairs. At the landing she stopped to draw
+breath, putting the pitcher upon the floor and relaxing her thin little
+arms. She was such a mite of a child, hardly more than eight or nine, if
+judged from the size of the spindly, undeveloped figure. This was
+swaddled in the ugly apron of blue-checked gingham, fastened down the
+back with large bone buttons, and so long in the sleeves that the little
+hands were all but lost, and so long in the skirt that only the ends of
+the small copper-toed shoes showed beneath. Judged, however, by the
+close-cropped head and the little sallow face that surmounted the
+aproned figure, she might have been a woman of twenty-five, so maturely
+developed was the one, so shrewd and knowing the other. The child leaned
+her shoulders upon the whitewashed wall and stared at me in bold, though
+not unfriendly curiosity, which, undoubtedly, I reciprocated. She was
+evidently sizing me up. I smiled, and she screwed her full, sensitive
+mouth into a judicial expression, puckering her forehead; then, in a
+deep, contralto voice, she spoke. What she said I didn't hear, or rather
+didn't grasp, in my wonder at the quality and timbre of that great
+voice, which, issuing from the folds of the checked apron, seemed fairly
+to fill the big hall below and the stair-well above with a deep,
+beautiful sound. I apologized and asked her to repeat what she had said.
+
+"Your skirt--it's so stylish," she said, and the little hand stole out
+and began stroking the snugly-fitting serge of that very unpretentious
+garment.
+
+"I'm very glad you like it," I laughed, "for it's the only skirt I
+have"; and I picked up the heavy pitcher and carried it up the rest of
+the way, the child following me, holding up her apron skirts with both
+hands to keep from stumbling, and making a ringing, metallic noise as
+the copper toes struck the wood at every rise. She took the pitcher at
+the head of the stairs without comment, but with a look full of
+diffident gratitude. Stopping before one of the doors, the child rapped
+timidly--so timidly, in fact, that it could scarcely be heard. No answer
+coming, she rapped again, this time a little louder, and a woman's
+shrill voice screamed, "Come in!"
+
+"Mis' Pitbladder, the lady down-stairs says as this is a young girl
+what wants to have a talk with youse about coming here," my little guide
+announced all in one breath, and almost before the door had entirely
+swung open upon the group within, consisting of an old lady and two
+little girls. The old lady was in a comfortable state of dishabille; the
+little girls each wore big checked gingham aprons like Julia's, and
+buttoned down the back with the same big, white bone buttons. One of
+them was waving Mrs. Pitbladder's hair with a crimping-iron which she
+heated in a gas-jet before the bureau; the other child was laboriously
+working at one of the pudgy hands with a pair of nail-scissors.
+
+"Come in, come in, and don't stand there with the door open," mumbled
+the bowed figure in the armchair, who held a twisted bit of uncrimped
+forelock between her teeth to keep it from getting mixed with what was
+already waved, and which fell over her face so that I could not see her
+features.
+
+"So you want to come here to board with us, my dear?" began the masked
+one, which was the signal for an exchange of grave winks between the
+hairdresser, the manicure, and the little slavey, Julia, who was pouring
+the hot water into the pitcher on the washstand.
+
+"If I could arrange it," I replied quickly, taking courage from the
+woman's kindly manner of putting the question, which was in such
+startling contrast to that of the dragon down-stairs.
+
+"You are a working girl, are you, my dear?"
+
+"I want to be. I'm looking for work now, and I hope to get a job in a
+few days. I understand your rates are very low, and that I can live here
+cheaper than almost anywhere else."
+
+"And who sent you here, my dear?"
+
+In answer to this I told her my story almost in totality, leaving out
+only such details as could not possibly have concerned her. Perfect
+candor, I was fast learning, was the only way in which one in my
+desperate situation could hope for any degree of sympathetic treatment,
+as the time for all silly pride was passed.
+
+Then Mrs. Pitbladder explained the system upon which the house was run.
+I could have a room all to myself for a dollar and a half a week, or I
+could sleep in the dormitory for ten cents a night, or fifty cents a
+week; all terms payable in advance. The latter fact she was particular
+to impress upon me. As to food, she named a price which fairly took away
+my breath. Six cents each for meals--six cents each for breakfast,
+dinner, and supper! I said at once I would become a boarder, and that I
+would take a cot in the dormitory, for which I would pay from night to
+night.
+
+At this juncture the girl who answered to the name of May finished
+undulating the last strand of gray hair, and as she lifted it off her
+mistress's face that lady raised her head and we looked at each other
+for the first time. She was somewhere between sixty-five and seventy,
+and very fat. Mrs. Pitbladder's face was a surprise to me, for all it
+was a round, red face--the very sort of face in which one would have
+expected good nature to repose. Its predominating features were a huge,
+beaked nose and high cheek-bones which encroached to an alarming degree
+upon the eye-sockets, wherein little dark, furtive eyes regarded me
+fixedly. It was a face which even the most unsophisticated observer
+could scarcely fail to characterize as that of a woman hardened in every
+sort of petty tyranny, a woman who, having the power to make others
+uncomfortable, found infinite pleasure in doing so, quite apart from any
+motive of selfish interest. To be sure, I did not read all this in Mrs.
+Pitbladder's face by the end of our first meeting. The supreme question
+to be settled, the only one which had for me a vital interest then, was
+how long I might still put off utter destitution in the event of my not
+finding work within the ensuing week.
+
+The terms were always in advance, Mrs. Pitbladder again repeated, as she
+entered my name and age in a long book which May brought from the dark
+mahogany desk that matched the rest of the well-made furniture in the
+spacious room. I would now pay her, she said, ten cents for the bed I
+was to sleep in that night, and my board money would be paid meal by
+meal to the woman in charge of the dining-room. I gave her a
+twenty-five-cent piece. I had remaining three other silver quarters. I
+watched my twenty-five-cent piece drop into Mrs. Pitbladder's purse, and
+heard the greedy mouth of that receptacle snap shut.
+
+"Mintie," Mrs. Pitbladder spoke briskly, "show this girl to the
+sitting-room, and then go and find Mrs. Lumley and tell her to come to
+me at once."
+
+Mintie, who had now finished lacing the matron's shoes, rose eagerly
+and, with a shy glance toward me, made for the door. I hesitated, and
+looked at Mrs. Pitbladder.
+
+"You may go now," she said, with a wave of the pudgy hand.
+
+"Excuse me," I replied, considerably abashed, quite as much by the
+curious looks of the little girls as by the annoyance of having to
+remind the matron about the fifteen cents change still due me--"excuse
+me, but I gave you twenty-five cents."
+
+"And I gave you your change, my dear," the matron returned suavely but
+decisively.
+
+"I beg your pardon for contradicting you," I replied firmly, and without
+taking my eyes from hers, which blinked unpleasantly. "You did _not_
+give me any change."
+
+"Look in your purse and see," said Mrs. Pitbladder.
+
+"It is quite unnecessary," I replied; "but I will do so to satisfy you";
+and I opened the purse again and showed my three remaining silver
+pieces, which to further satisfy her I took out upon my palm and then
+turned the purse's lining inside out.
+
+But Mrs. Pitbladder did not seem impressed. I for my part resolved to be
+equally insistent, inspired as I was with the determination that comes
+to desperate people. There were fifteen cents due me, and nobody should
+cheat me out of a single one of those precious pennies if I could
+possibly prevent it. There was a short silence in which we took each
+other's measure, the children looking on in evident enjoyment of the
+situation. Finally the old lady opened the purse again and gave me the
+change due, though she grumblingly maintained that it was I, not she,
+who was in error.
+
+When the door closed at last upon us, my small companion clutched my
+hand and gave it a jubilant squeeze. "Golly! that did me good," she
+whispered as we were going down-stairs. "She always lets on to make
+mistakes about the girls' change, only most of 'em is so scairt of her
+they just let her beat them out of it."
+
+While the child went to find Mrs. Lumley I waited in the sitting-room.
+It was an empty, ugly place, with bare floors and whitewashed walls, the
+latter decorated, like those of the office, with framed scriptural
+texts. Its furniture consisted of several long, slat-bottomed settees
+and a single large rocking-chair which, crowded with children, was
+swinging noisily over the bare boards. At our entrance the chair stopped
+rocking, and one of the children climbed out.
+
+It was Julia. She came promptly over to my side, while a half-dozen of
+the other children jumped off the benches and ran to the rocking-chair
+to squabble over the question of who should take the vacant place.
+
+"Did yez have a row?" she asked eagerly. "Say, did yez?"
+
+I evaded the question, thinking it neither advisable nor proper to
+satisfy the curiosity of the little mite. To divert her attention, I
+began questioning her about herself and her little companions--who were
+they, what were they, and how did they come to be here?
+
+"Why, don't you know?" the little one asked, looking at me in amazement.
+"We're waifs!"
+
+"Waifs! What sort of waifs?"
+
+"Why, just waifs."
+
+"But I didn't know this was an orphan-asylum," I said, looking about at
+the children sitting in rows of two and three upon the scattered
+settees.
+
+"Oh, no, ma'am. We're not orfants," the child hastened to correct me;
+"we're just waifs."
+
+"And where are your fathers and mothers, then?" I cried.
+
+"We ain't got none," Julia replied promptly, the little hand again
+stealing through the long sleeve and stroking my much-admired skirt. She
+had now snuggled down beside me upon the settee, and instinctively,
+rather than from any desire to show friendliness, I drew my arm about
+the small shoulders, which overture was interpreted as an invitation for
+the cropped head to nestle closer.
+
+"But if you haven't father or mothers, then you must be orphans," I
+reasoned,--an argument which made Julia straighten up suddenly and look
+at me in puzzled wonderment.
+
+"No, we ain't orfants, neither, exceptin' just a few that did onct have
+fathers and mothers, mebbe; but me and May Wistaria and Mintie
+Delancy--they was the girls you seen up-stairs in HER room--we never did
+have no fathers and mothers, we're just waifs, and so's them kids waifs
+too that's playing in the rocking-chair. They was all foundling-asylum
+kids."
+
+At this moment a thick-set woman in a black dress appeared in the
+doorway, which was a signal for all the little girls to make an
+onslaught upon her. They twined their arms about her large waist, they
+hung three and four upon each of her generous, kindly arms, and the
+smaller girls held on to her skirts.
+
+Thus encumbered, the good Mrs. Lumley introduced herself in an asthmatic
+voice which was scarcely more than a whisper, and in a manner as kindly
+as it was humble. Then she shoved the children back to their benches,
+and led me up-stairs to the dormitory; showing me the cot where I was to
+sleep, the lavatory where I would make my toilet in the mornings, and
+the bath-room where I had the privilege of taking a bath once a week.
+She also told me the rules of the house: first bell at six o'clock, when
+everybody in the dormitory must rise and dress; second bell at half-past
+six, when everybody must leave the dormitory, not to return until
+bedtime. As to that hour, it came at various times: for the waifs it was
+seven o'clock; for the regular lodgers, ten o'clock; and for the
+transients, from seven till twelve o'clock, at which hour the house was
+closed for the night.
+
+All this Mrs. Lumley repeated in a dreary monotone which seemed
+strangely out of keeping with the half-concealed kindliness which was
+revealed in her homely countenance. She was a working matron, a sort of
+upper servant, and had been three years in the place, which, I gradually
+gleaned from her, had been started as a home for destitute children and
+had eventually assumed the character and discharged the functions of a
+girls' lodging-house. Under what auspices the house was conducted she
+didn't know any more than did I, any more than I know to this day. There
+was a board of managers,--ladies who sometimes came to look at the
+dormitories and the bath-rooms and then went away again in their
+carriages; there was the matron, Mrs. Pitbladder, who had been there
+four or five years, she thought, but wasn't certain; there were several
+under-matrons, who acted as teachers to the children. What did the
+children study? Reading and writing and arithmetic and the Bible; and
+then, as soon as they were old enough, they were turned into the
+sewing-room, where they were taught dressmaking, or into the laundry,
+where they learned to do fine laundry-work.
+
+All this sounded just and good, and I began to alter my opinion of the
+place. I even began to think that perhaps Mrs. Pitbladder was merely
+absent-minded and a little crotchety; that she had not meant to forget
+my fifteen cents change. I did not know until several days later that
+the house did a large dressmaking and laundry business, and that their
+advertisement appeared, and does to this day appear, in all the daily
+newspapers. It was from the older girls in the dormitory, in whispered
+talks we had at night after we were in bed, that I learned this and
+innumerable other things, which my own observation during the weeks that
+followed served to confirm.
+
+To this home for working girls the waifs, the foundlings, came at all
+sorts of tender years, came from God only knows where--I could never
+find out exactly--some of them, perhaps, from city asylums, some from
+the families upon which they had been left as an encumbrance. They came
+as little children, and they went away as grown women. For them the home
+was practically a prison. Locked in here from morning till night, week
+in, week out, year after year, they were prisoners at all save certain
+stated times when they were taken abroad for a walk under charge of the
+matrons. In return for a scant education in the rudimentary branches,
+and a very generous tuition in the drudgery of the kitchen, the laundry,
+and the sewing-room, they received in all these years only their board
+and clothes and a certain nominal protection against the vices and
+corruptions of the street and the gutter from which they had been
+snatched.
+
+
+"You won't eat here?" Mrs. Lumley inquired as we were going down-stairs
+again. To which I replied with a "Yes, why not? I have arranged with
+Mrs. Pitbladder to do so."
+
+We were on the landing where the stairs turned into the ground-floor.
+She glanced apprehensively at Mrs. Pitbladder's door, into which a small
+blue-aproned figure at this moment was passing with a tray laden with
+Mrs. Pitbladder's breakfast. When it had closed again, she looked at me
+hesitatingly, as if fearful of taking me too far into her confidence.
+Then, perhaps reading a certain unconscious reassurance there, she
+replied with a brief--
+
+"I wouldn't, if I was you. You can't stand it."
+
+"But I'll have to stand it," I returned; "I'm as poor as anybody here."
+
+She shook her head. "But you couldn't work on it--you're not used to it.
+I can see that. Besides, it isn't so cheap as you think it'll be. You'd
+better go out. I wouldn't even eat here to-day. I wouldn't begin it.
+There's a little lunch-room over on Third Avenue where you can get
+enough to eat, and just as cheap as here."
+
+The woman's manner was so mysterious, and withal so very earnest, not to
+say urgent, that I felt instinctively that there was something more in
+all she said than the mere depreciation of the quality of the victuals
+she warned me against. So I was not surprised when she said slowly and
+insinuatingly, as though feeling every step of the way:
+
+"You know the misunderstanding you had this morning--about the change?"
+
+"Yes," I answered, more mystified than ever. Then, as she looked me full
+in the eyes, light dawned upon me, and I saw the old woman up-stairs in
+a character as startling as it was infamous.
+
+"Well," Mrs. Lumley said, when she saw that I understood; and with that
+she again dropped into her habitual expression of bovine stolidness. We
+parted at the foot of the stairs, she to disappear into the back of the
+house, and I to join the waifs in the unfriendly sitting-room.
+
+The afternoon I spent sitting in Union Square, whence I went at
+half-past five for a bite of supper in the dairy lunch-room where I had
+made my toilet in the morning. I had had no luncheon, feeling that I
+could not afford more than two meals a day now. I sat a long time over
+my cup of coffee and three hard rolls. I did not want to return to that
+dreary house until the lamps should be lighted and it was time to go to
+bed. The very thought of returning to sit with those forlorn waifs, in
+that cheerless whitewashed sitting-room, was appalling.
+
+I returned a few minutes before seven, just in time to hear the children
+singing the last stanza of "Beulah Land" as I passed up-stairs to the
+dormitory on the third floor. An old woman sat outside the door,
+crocheting a shawl in such light as she could get from a blue-shaded
+night-lamp that hung in the middle of the great whitewashed room within.
+She looked up from her work long enough to challenge me with a shrewd,
+impertinent look of inquiry, demanded to know if I had any lead-pencils
+about my person, and, receiving a polite negative, allowed me to pass.
+
+I was not the first arrival. In the dim light I could make out, here and
+there, a bulging surface in the row of gray-blanketed cots, while in the
+quiet I could hear the deep breathing of the sleepers. For they all
+seemed to be asleep, save one who tossed from one side to the other and
+sighed wearily. The latter was not far away from my own cot, and before
+I had finished undressing she was sitting up looking at me.
+
+"I'd give anything for a drink of water," she said softly.
+
+"Why, is there no water?" I whispered.
+
+The words were not out of my mouth before there was a thumping upon the
+floor outside, and the voice of the beldame spoke sharply:
+
+"No talking, girls!"
+
+The thirsty girl dropped back to her pillow, and I crept under the
+blanket. Later on I learned that each must have her drink of water
+before entering the dormitory, because, once there, it was an iron-clad
+rule that we should not leave until after the rising-bell had rung at
+six the next morning. I also learned, later on, that had there not been
+also an iron-clad rule against carrying lead-pencils into the
+dormitory, the snowy-white walls were like as not to be scrawled with
+obscenities during the night hours.
+
+All sorts of girls seeking a night's refuge drifted into this
+working-girls' home. Most of them were "ne'er-do-weels"; some of them
+were girls of lax morality, though very few were essentially "bad."
+When, however, they did happen to be "bad," they were very bad indeed.
+And these lead-pencil inscriptions they left behind them were the
+frightful testimony of their innate depravity.
+
+Fortunately for me, I was quite ignorant on this first night of what the
+character of the girls under the gray blankets might in all possibility
+have been, and I settled myself to go to sleep with the thought that a
+working-girls' home was not half bad, after all.
+
+A little while later there was a fresh burst of childish voices and the
+clatter of shoes on the stairs. It was the orphans marching up to bed
+singing "Happy Day!" The music stopped when they reached the dormitory
+door, which they entered silently, two by two. Their undressing was but
+the matter of a few moments, so methodical and precise was every
+movement. The small aprons and petticoats were folded across the foot of
+each cot, and, on top, the long black stockings laid neatly. Each pair
+of copper-toed shoes was placed in exactly the same spot under the foot
+of each cot, and each little body, after wriggling itself into a gray
+flannellet nightgown, dropped to its knees and bowed its head upon the
+blanket in silent prayer.
+
+After they had tucked themselves in bed a voice very near me, and which
+I recognized as Julia's, whispered:
+
+"May, are yez asleep?"
+
+"No," muttered May.
+
+"Say, is to-morrow bean day or molasses day?"
+
+"Bean," replied May; and then all was silent in the dormitory, and so
+remained save for the interruption caused by the tiptoe entrance of some
+newly arrived "transient," some homeless wanderer driven here to seek a
+night refuge.
+
+In the morning we washed and combed in a large common toilet-room. There
+were only a dozen face-bowls, and these we had to watch our chance to
+pounce upon. I waited until the rush was over, and after the orphans had
+scurried down to their breakfast I performed a more leisurely toilet.
+Two other girls were there, doing the same thing. I recognized them as
+transient lodgers, like myself, wanderers that had drifted in.
+
+Both were very young, and one, whom I had heard sigh, and who groaned
+continuously in her sleep, very, very pretty. The latter entered into
+conversation as we combed before the long, narrow glass. "Do you stay
+here all the time?" I asked. No, she had been living with her
+"lady-friend"; and that lady-friend having departed to the country for
+lack of employment until times would pick up, she was looking about for
+a boarding-house. The subject of work gave me my opportunity, and I
+asked her if she knew of a job. She shook her head. She was a
+skirt-hand; she had worked in a Broadway sweat-shop, and didn't know
+anything about any other sort of work. As we talked she finished her
+toilet, putting on as the finishing touch a great picture-hat and a
+scanty black Eton. Ready for the street, you would have little dreamed
+that she had slept in a ten-cent lodging-house. After going through a
+sort of inspection by the old woman at the entrance, during which it was
+ascertained we had not pilfered anything, we were allowed to depart.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+IN WHICH I SPEND A HAPPY FOUR WEEKS MAKING ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS
+
+
+Bright and early, after a four-cent breakfast, I was on my way to find
+the place where I had read the sign, "Flower-makers Wanted.--Paid while
+learning."
+
+It was not difficult to find, even had I not had the number so securely
+tucked away in my memory.
+
+"Flowers & Feathers," in giant gilded letters, I read a block away, as I
+dodged electric cars and motor vehicles, and threaded the maze of
+delivery wagons and vans. I had a hasty interview with the
+superintendent, a large and effusively polite man, whose plump white
+hands sparkled with gems. He put me on the freight-elevator and told the
+boy to show me to Miss Higgins. At the third floor the iron doors were
+thrown open, and I stepped into what seemed to be a great, luxuriant
+garden. The room was long and wide, and golden with April sunshine, and
+in the April breeze that blew through the half-open windows a million
+flowers fluttered and danced in the ecstacy of spring. Flowers, flowers,
+flowers everywhere; piled high on the tables, tossed in mad confusion on
+the floor, and strung in long garlands to the far end of the big room.
+
+"The lady with the black hair, sitting down there by them American
+Beauties," said the elevator-boy, waving his hand toward the rear.
+
+I passed down a narrow path between two rows of tables that looked like
+blossoming hedges. Through the green of branches and leaves flashed the
+white of shirt-waists, and among the scarlet and purple and yellow and
+blue of myriad flowers bobbed the smiling faces of girls as they looked
+up from their task long enough to inspect the passing stranger. Here
+were no harsh sounds, no rasping voices, no shrill laughter, no pounding
+of engines. Everything just as one would expect to find it in a
+flower-garden--soft voices humming like bees, and gentle merriment that
+flowed musically as a brook over stones.
+
+"The lady with the black hair" sat before a cleared space on a table
+banked on either side with big red roses. In front of her were three or
+four glasses, each containing one salmon-colored rose, fresh and
+fragrant from the hothouse.
+
+Leaning forward, with her elbows on the table and her chin in her palm,
+she was staring intently at these four splendid blooms. Then she picked
+up a half-finished muslin rose and compared them. All this I saw while I
+waited timidly for her to look up. But she did not see me. She was
+absorbed in the study of the living rose. At last I summoned courage to
+inquire if she was Miss Higgins. She started, looked up quickly, and
+nodded her head, with a smile that displayed a row of pretty teeth. Her
+manner was cordial.
+
+"Have you ever worked at flowers before?" she asked.
+
+"No."
+
+"Ever worked at feathers?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, the best I can do is to put you at blossom-making to-day, and see
+how you take to it. It's too bad, though, you don't know anything about
+feathers; for the flower season ends in a month, anyway, and then I have
+to lay off all my girls till September, unless they can make feathers
+too. Then they get jobs on the next floor. There'll be lots of work
+here, though, for a month, and we might take you back in September."
+
+The tone was so kindly, the interest so genuine, that I was prompted to
+explain my situation, assuring her I should be glad to get work even for
+four weeks. As a result, I was put on Rosenfeld's pay-roll for three and
+a half dollars per week, with half a day's extra pay for night work: the
+latter had been a necessity three or four nights every week for six
+months, and was likely to continue for two, maybe three, weeks longer.
+Besides the assurance of extra pay from this source, Miss Higgins also
+intimated, as she conducted me to one of the tables, that if I was "able
+to make good" she would raise me to four dollars at the end of the week.
+
+Soon I was "slipping up" poppies under the instruction of Bessie, a
+dreamy-eyed young Jewess. The process was simple enough, to watch the
+skilled fingers of the other girls, but it was very tedious to my
+untried hand. In awkward, self-conscious fashion I began to open out the
+crimped wads of scarlet muslin which came to us hot from the
+crimping-machine.
+
+"You mustn't smooth the creases out too much," Bessie protested; and
+with a deft touch, the right pull here, the proper flattening there, the
+muslin scrap blossomed into a fluttering corolla.
+
+"Don't get discouraged. We've all got to learn," one of the girls at
+the far end of the table called out cheerily.
+
+"Yes, and don't be afraid of making a mistake," put in my vis-a-vis, a
+pretty Italian. "We all make mistakes while we're learning; but you'll
+find this a nice place to work, and Miss Higgins is so lovely--she's
+awful nice, too, to the new girls."
+
+"Yes, indeed," added Bessie. "It isn't many years since she worked at
+the table herself. I've often heard her tell about the first day she
+went to work down at Golderberg's."
+
+"That's the worst in town," piped another; "I stayed there just two
+days. That was enough for me. Whenever the girls disagree down there,
+they step out into the hall and lick each other. First day I was there,
+one girl got two ribs broken. Her rival just walked all over her."
+
+"What did they do with the girls?"
+
+"Oh, nothing. They made it all up, and were as sweet as two
+turtle-doves, walking around the workroom with their arms around each
+other."
+
+"Well, that's what it is to work in those cheap shops," commented Annie
+Welshons, of the big blue eyes and yellow hair. "If they ever do get
+respectable girls, they won't stay long."
+
+As we worked the conversation ran easily. The talk was in good,
+up-to-date English. There was rarely a mispronounced word, or a slip in
+grammar; and there was just enough well-selected slang to make the
+dialogue bright and to stamp the chatterers as conversant with the live
+questions of the day. The topics at all times bespoke clean minds and an
+intelligent point of view.
+
+"Are you American born?" Bessie inquired by and by.
+
+The question sounded unusual, almost unnecessary, until I discovered
+that out of the eight girls in our immediate circle, only half were
+native Americans. My vis-a-vis, Therese, was a Neapolitan; Mamie, a
+Genoese; Amelia was born in Bohemia; the girl with the yellow hair was
+North German; and Nellie declared she was from County Killarney and
+mighty glad of it.
+
+"Well, I'm an American," said Bessie, tossing her head in mock scorn, as
+she cleared away a quantity of the flowers that had been meanwhile
+accumulating on the wire lines.
+
+Therese laughed. "But only by the skin of your teeth--an eleventh-hour
+arrival." Then she turned to me and whispered that Bessie was born only
+two weeks after her mother came to this country.
+
+"Better late than never," laughed Bessie, casting a backward and
+withering glance at the aliens as she moved away with her trayful of
+scarlet blossoms to the branchers' table, where another relay of workers
+twisted green leaves among the scarlet and tied them in wreaths and
+bunches.
+
+By eleven o'clock I had made two dozen poppies, which Amelia told me was
+"just grand for a beginner." I began to feel confident that I should
+hold the job, and my fingers flew. Into the glue-pot at my right hand I
+dipped my little finger, picking up at the same moment with my other
+hand a bit of paper-covered wire. On the end of the wire was a bunch of
+short yellow threads, which were touched lightly with my glue-smeared
+finger, the wire being held between the thumb and forefinger. With the
+free left hand, I caught up a fluttering corolla, touching its
+perforated center with glue; then I "slipped up" the wire about an inch,
+took up another corolla in the same way, and then drew the two to the
+"pipped" or heart end of the wire, where they now became a big red
+flower with a golden eye. A bit of dark-green rubber tubing drawn over
+the wire completed the process, the end was bent into a hook, and the
+full-blown poppy hung on the line.
+
+At a quarter past eleven a little girl wearing an immense flower-hat
+and carrying a large market-basket came and asked us for our lunch
+orders. She carried a long piece of pasteboard and wrote as the girls
+dictated. One could buy anything one wanted, Bessie explained; bread and
+butter, eggs, chops, steak, potatoes, canned goods, for which there was
+ample provision for cooking on the gas-stoves used by the rose-makers to
+heat their pincers. When the little girl was gone I learned that she was
+one of the errand-runners, and that this was her daily task.
+
+"How far does she go to market?"
+
+"Over to First Avenue."
+
+"Isn't that pretty far for a small girl to carry such a heavy load?"
+
+"Oh, she doesn't mind it. All the errand-girls are tickled to death to
+get the job. The grocers pay them ten per cent. commission on all they
+buy."
+
+It lacked but a few minutes of twelve when the child returned, panting
+under her burden.
+
+"How much did you clear to-day?" somebody asked.
+
+"Twenty-one cents," the child answered, blushing as red as the poppies.
+
+When Miss Higgins slipped her tall, light figure into her stylish jacket
+and began to pin on her hat it was always a sign that the lunch-hour had
+come. One hundred and twenty girls popped up from their hiding-places
+behind the hedges, which had grown to great height since morning. In a
+trice spaces were cleared on the tables. Cups and saucers and knives and
+forks appeared as if by magic. In that portion of the room where the
+crimping-machines stood preparations for cooking commenced. The pincers
+and tongs of the rose-makers, and the pressing-molds of the
+leaf-workers, were taken off the fires, and in their place appeared
+stew-pans and spiders, and pots and kettles. Bacon and chops sputtered,
+steak sizzled; potatoes, beans, and corn stewed merrily. What had been
+but lately a flower-garden, by magic had become a mammoth kitchen filled
+with appetizing sounds and delicious odors. White-aproned cooks scurried
+madly. It was like a school-girls' picnic. As they moved about I noticed
+how well dressed and neat were my shop-mates in their white shirt-waists
+and dark skirts. Indeed, in the country village I had come from any one
+of them would have appeared as the very embodiment of fashion.
+
+Cooked and served at last, we ate our luncheon at leisure, and with the
+luxury of snowy-white table-cloths and napkins of tissue-paper, which
+needs of the workroom were supplied in prodigal quantities.
+
+During this hour I heard a great deal about the girls and their work.
+They told me, as they told all new-comers, of the wonderful rise of Miss
+Higgins, who began as a table-worker at three and a half dollars a week,
+and was now making fifty dollars. They told me of her rise from the best
+rose-maker in New York to designer and forewoman. They dwelt on her
+kindness to everybody, discussed her pretty clothes, and wondered which
+of her beaux she was going to marry.
+
+All afternoon I "slipped up" poppies. At five Miss Higgins came to tell
+me I was "doing fine," and that I should have four dollars instead of
+three and a half. This made the work easier than ever, and my fingers
+flew happily till six o'clock. Then we cooked dinner as we did our
+luncheon, but we took only half an hour for our evening meal, so as to
+get off at half-past nine instead of ten. At night the work was harder,
+as the room became terribly hot from the gas-jets and from the stoves
+where the rose-makers heated their tools. The faces grew tired and pale,
+and the girls sang to keep themselves awake. "The Rabbi's Daughter,"
+"The City of Sighs and Tears," and "The Banquet in Misery Hall" were the
+favorite songs. A rising breeze swept up Broadway, now almost deserted,
+and rushed through the windows, setting all our blossoms fluttering.
+Outside a soft, warm spring rain began to fall on the tired, sleepy
+city.
+
+
+One week, two weeks, passed in these pleasant surroundings. I was still
+"slipping up" poppies all day long, and every evening till half-past
+nine. Then I went home to the little cot in the dormitory of the "home."
+It would seem that all the world's wife and daughters were to wear
+nothing but poppies that season. But ours was only a small portion of
+Rosenfeld's output. Violets, geraniums, forget-me-nots,
+lilies-of-the-valley, apple-blossoms, daisies, and roses of a score of
+varieties were coming to life in this big garden in greater multitudes
+even than our common poppies. Forty girls worked on roses alone. The
+rose-makers are the swells of the trade. They are the best paid, the
+most independent, and always in competitive demand during the flower
+season. Any one can learn with patience how to make other kinds of
+flowers; but the rose-maker is born, and the thoroughly experienced
+rose-maker is an artist. Her work has a distinction, a touch, a "feel,"
+as she calls it, which none but the artist can give.
+
+The star rose-maker of the shop, next to the forewoman (who was reputed
+the finest in America), was about twenty-five. Her hair was fluffy and
+brown, and her eyes big and dark blue. She was of Irish birth, and had
+been in America about fourteen years. One day I stopped at her chair and
+asked how long it took her to learn.
+
+"I'm still learning," she replied, without looking up from the tea-rose
+in her fingers. "It was seven years before I considered myself
+first-class; and though I'm at it now thirteen, I don't consider I know
+it all yet." She worked rapidly, flecking the delicate salmon-colored
+petals with her glue-finger, and pasting them daintily around the
+fast-growing rose. I watched her pinch and press and crease each frail
+petal with her hot iron instruments, and when she had put on a thick
+rubber stem and hung the finished flower on the line she looked up and
+smiled.
+
+"Want to see a rose-maker's hand?" she remarked, turning her palm up for
+my inspection. She laughed aloud at my exclamation of horror. Calloused
+and hard as a piece of tortoise-shell, ridged with innumerable
+corrugations, and hopelessly discolored, with the thumb and forefinger
+flattened like miniature spades, her right hand had long ago lost nearly
+all semblance to the other.
+
+"It is the hot irons do that," she said, drawing her pincers from the
+fire and twirling them in the air until they grew cool enough to proceed
+with the work. "We use them every minute. We crease the petals with
+them, and crinkle and vein and curl the outer edges. And we always have
+to keep them just hot enough not to scorch the thin muslin."
+
+"How many can you make a day?"
+
+"That depends on the rose. This sort--" picking up a small, cheap June
+rose--"this sort a fair worker can make a gross of a day. But I have
+made roses where five single flowers were considered a fine day's job.
+Each of those roses had one hundred and seventy-five pieces, however;
+and there were eighteen different shapes and sizes of petals; and
+besides that, every one of those pieces had to be put in its own place.
+If one piece had been wrongly applied, the whole rose would have been
+spoiled. But they don't make many of such complicated roses in this
+country. They have to import them. They haven't enough skilled workers
+to fill big orders, and it doesn't pay the manufacturers to bother with
+small orders."
+
+The girl did all the fine work of the place, and had always more waiting
+to be done than she could have accomplished with four hands instead of
+two. She had no rival to whom this surplus work could be turned over.
+The dull season had no terrors for her, nor would it have had for her
+comrades had they been equally skilled. She made from twenty-two to
+twenty-five dollars a week, all the year round, and was too busy ever to
+take a vacation. The other girls averaged nine dollars, and if they got
+eight months' work a year they considered themselves fortunate. They
+were clever and industrious, but they had not learned to make the finer
+grade of roses.
+
+The third week came and went all too quickly, and we were now entering
+on the fourth. Plainly the season was drawing to its close. The orders
+that had come pouring in from milliners and modistes all over the land
+for six months were now dwindling daily. The superintendent and the
+"boss" walked through the department every day, and we heard them talk
+about overproduction. Friday the atmosphere was tense with anxiety. The
+girls' faces were grave. Almost without exception, there were people at
+home upon whom this annual "lay-off" fell with tragic force. I have not
+talked with one of them who did not have to work, and they have always
+some one at home to care for. A few were widows with small children at
+home or in the day nursery. One can tell little, by their appearance,
+about these secret burdens. Each girl wears a mask. The neat costume,
+made with her own hands in midnight hours snatched from hard-earned
+rest, is no evidence of extravagance, or even of comfortable
+circumstances. It is only that manifestation of proper pride and
+self-respect which the best type of wage-earning woman is never without.
+If they sometimes talk happily about theaters and parties and beaux, if
+occasionally there is a brief spell of innocent hilarity in the
+workroom, it is only the inevitable and legitimate outcropping of
+healthy and wholesome animal spirits, of a vigorous hope which not even
+the hard conditions of life can crush.
+
+On Saturday morning many of the girls sat idle. "Don't work too fast, or
+you'll work yourself out of a job," one cried in jest; but the meaning
+was one of dead earnest. And as the day passed the prophecy came true to
+one after another. In the afternoon we made a feint of work by papering
+wires and opening petals for those who were still busy. The hours passed
+drearily. Miss Higgins was going over her pay-roll, checking off the
+names of the girls who could make feathers as well as flowers. All
+others were to be laid off indefinitely that night. We watched anxiously
+for the moment, which was not far off.
+
+"I hope Miss Higgins won't cry--she did last year. It breaks her up
+terribly to let us off," somebody remarked.
+
+"It's a long time to be idle--till September," I suggested to the girl
+across the work-table. She looked up in surprise.
+
+"Idle!" she exclaimed. "But we are never idle. We daren't. We get other
+jobs."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Oh, everything: waitress in a summer boarding-house, novelty goods,
+binderies, shirt-waists, stores, anything we can get."
+
+"She's coming," some one whispered. Everybody tried to look unconcerned.
+Those who had no work to claim attention looked carefully at their
+finger-nails, or found sudden necessity to adjust collars and belts.
+Miss Higgins passed along the tables, bending over the heads and
+speaking to each in a low voice. The tears were running down her cheeks.
+Those retained concealed their happiness as best they could, and spoke
+words of sympathy and encouragement to their less fortunate companions.
+The warrants were received with a stoicism that was more pathetic than
+tears. From the far end of the room I heard an unaccustomed sound, and
+turning, I saw the forewoman, who had dropped into a chair at the
+forget-me-not table, her face buried in her arms, and sobbing like a
+child. It was the signal that her cruel duty was done, that the last
+"lay-off" sentence had been pronounced, that the work for the day and
+for the "season" was over, that it had come time to say good-by.
+
+"Good-by!" The voices echoed as we trooped down-stairs to the street
+door. "Good-by! Good-by!" The lingering farewells rose faintly above the
+noises of Broadway, as we scattered at the corner. Good-by to
+Rosenfeld's--now no longer a reality, but rather a memory of idyllic
+beauty--the workroom bright with sunshine and flashing with color, with
+the faces of the workers bent over the fashioning of rose and poppy, and
+best of all, the kind hearts and the quick sympathy that blossomed there
+as luxuriantly as the flowers themselves.
+
+Good-by to my four happiest weeks in the workaday world.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+THREE "LADY-FRIENDS," AND THE ADVENTURES THAT BEFALL THEM
+
+
+Into every human experience there must come sooner or later the bitter
+consciousness that Nature is remorselessly cruel; that she laughs
+loudest when we are most miserable; that she is never so bright, never
+so beautiful as in the darkest hour of our need; that she ever makes
+mock of our agony and ever smiles serenely at our despair.
+
+Such, at least, were my feelings in those long, beautiful June days that
+followed close on the "lay-off" at Rosenfeld's.
+
+Dear little Bessie! poor unhappy Eunice! This chapter of my experiences
+is so dominated by their personalities that I shall devote a few words
+to recounting the circumstances which brought us together and sent us
+faring forth on a summer's day to seek new fortunes, three
+"lady-friends," arm in arm. I make no apology for saying
+"lady-friends." I know all the prejudices of polite society, which
+smiles at what is esteemed to be a piece of vulgar vanity characteristic
+of the working-girl world. And yet I use the term here in all
+seriousness, in all good faith; not critically, not playfully, but
+tenderly. Because in the humble world in which our comradeship was
+formed there is none other to designate the highest type of friendship,
+no other phrase to define that affection between girl and girl which is
+as the love of sisters. In the great workaday world where we toiled and
+hoped and prayed and suffered together for a brief period we were called
+"the three lady-friends" by our shop-mates, and such we were to each
+other always, and such we shall be throughout the chapter; and I know,
+if Bessie and Eunice were here to-night, looking over my shoulder as I
+write the account of that sordid little tragedy and the part they played
+in it,--I know they would clasp their rough little hands in mine and nod
+approval.
+
+Bessie had been my "learner" at Rosenfeld's. I still remember her
+exactly as I saw her that first time, a slender little figure bending
+over the work-table. Her shirt-waist was snowy-white, and fastened
+down--oh, so securely!--under the narrow leather belt; she had a wealth
+of straight blonde hair of that clear, transparent quality which, when
+heaped high on her head, looked like a mass of spun glass; her cheeks,
+which were naturally very pale, burned a deep crimson as they reflected
+the light on the poppies beneath; and after a while, when she raised her
+head, I saw that her eyes were blue, and that her profile, sharp and
+clear cut, was that of a young Jewess. I had thought her to be about
+twenty-two,--for, pretty and fresh as she was, she looked every day of
+it,--but I found out later that she was not then eighteen.
+
+We had not been long getting acquainted--that is, as well acquainted as
+was possible in a busy shop like Rosenfeld's. Indeed, it would be a
+strange, sad world--stranger and sadder than it really is--if Bessie and
+I had not sooner or later established a certain bond of intimacy.
+Sitting opposite at the same work-table, we made poppies together and
+exchanged our little stories. She had been working, since she was
+fifteen, at all sorts of odd jobs: cash-girl in a department store;
+running errands for a fashionable modiste; cashier in a dairy
+lunch-room; making picture-frames. This was her second season at
+flower-making, and she liked it better than anything she had ever tried,
+if only there was work all the year round; for she couldn't afford to
+sit idle through the long summer months--well, I should say not!--with
+eight small brothers and sisters at home, and a rather incompetent
+father, and sixteen dollars a month rent! The experiences of a score of
+shops, and the motley crew of people she had worked with in these busy
+years, Bessie in her careless, simple narrative had the power to invest
+with lifelike reality.
+
+Scarcely less interesting than all this to me was my own story to
+Bessie, which found ready sympathy in her tender heart, especially that
+part of it that had to do with the home for working girls where I was
+now living. For to Bessie, with her inborn racial love of family,
+nothing was so much to be pitied as the unfortunates who found shelter
+there. She seemed to take a certain sort of consolation for her own hard
+life in hearing the sordid details of the wretched waifs and strays that
+came wandering into the "home" at all hours of the day and night. I told
+her about the dormitory where we slept side by side in gray-blanketed
+cots, each girl's clothes folded neatly across the footboard; of the
+cross old dragon who sat outside in the brightly lighted passageway, and
+snored all night long, when she should have been attending to her
+duties,--which duties were to keep an eye on us lest we rob one another
+of the few pennies we might have under our pillows, or that we might not
+scrawl obscene verses on the whitewashed walls, in case we had succeeded
+in smuggling in a forbidden lead-pencil. For such offenses, and they
+happened only too often, we were all held equally guilty in the eyes of
+the sour, autocratic matron. As each night brought a fresh relay of
+girls to the dormitory, it was productive of a new series of episodes,
+which I related faithfully to Bessie.
+
+That is how she became interested in Eunice. The latter had come
+tiptoeing into the dormitory one night long after the other girls were
+fast asleep, and without undressing threw herself on the vacant cot next
+to mine. In the lamplight that shone from the passageway full on her
+face, I saw, as I peeped above the rough blanket, that the new-comer was
+no common type of waif and stray. There was an elusive charm in the
+glimpse of profile and in the delicate aquiline features, a certain
+suggestion of beauty, were it not for the white, drawn look that
+enveloped them like a death-mask. As I was gazing furtively at her she
+turned on her side, moaning as only a girl can moan when peace of mind
+is gone forever. Such sounds were not uncommon in the dormitory. Several
+times, waking in the night, I had listened pityingly to the same
+half-smothered lament. On this night I had fallen asleep as usual, when
+suddenly a shriek rang out, and I wakened to hear the angry accents of
+the beldam protesting against "hysterics," and the indistinct muttering
+of the girlish sleepers whose rest the stranger had so inconsiderately
+disturbed. In a few moments everything was quiet again, our old woman
+had renewed her snoring, and then the new-comer, repressing her anguish
+as best she could, slid kneeling to the floor.
+
+It was then, all sleep gone for that night, I reached out my hand and
+touched the sleeve of her black dress.
+
+From that moment we became friends. The information which she vouchsafed
+about herself was meager and not of a character to throw much light upon
+her former condition and environment. It was obvious that there had been
+a tragedy in her life, and I instinctively guessed what that tragedy
+was, although I respected the reserve she threw around her and asked no
+indiscreet questions. She was fairly well educated, had been brought up
+in a small New Jersey village, and had been a stenographer until she
+went to a telephone office to tend a switchboard. Between that job and
+her advent in the "home" was an obvious hiatus, which at times she
+vaguely referred to as a period wherein she "lost her grip on
+everything." She had no money, and her clothes were even shabbier than
+my own, and she was too discouraged even to look for work. Her cot and
+three meager meals a day, consisting of bread and tea for breakfast and
+supper, and bread and coffee and soup for dinner, she received, as did
+all the transient boarders, in return for a ten-hour-day's work in the
+"home" kitchen. After a few nights she ceased moaning, and settled
+gradually into a hopeless apathy, while over her deep gray eyes there
+grew a film of silent misery.
+
+Stirred by my fragmentary accounts of Eunice's wretchedness, the
+generous-hearted Bessie one day suggested that we take her with us to
+look for a job as soon as the anticipated "lay-off" notice came into
+effect at Rosenfeld's. And so, on the Monday morning following that
+dreaded event, Bessie met Eunice and me at the lower right-hand corner
+of Broadway and Grand Street, and together we applied for work at the
+R---- Underwear Company, which had advertised that morning for twenty
+operators.
+
+"Ever run a power Singer?" queried the foreman.
+
+"No, but we can learn. We're all quick," answered Bessie, who had
+volunteered to act as spokesman.
+
+"Yes, I guess you can learn all right, but you won't make very much at
+first. All come together?... So! Well, then, I guess you'll want to work
+in the same room," and with that he ushered us into a very inferno of
+sound, a great, yawning chaos of terrific noise. The girls, who sat in
+long rows up and down the length of the great room, did not raise their
+eyes to the new-comers, as is the rule in less strenuous workrooms.
+Every pair of eyes seemed to be held in fascination upon the flying and
+endless strip of white that raced through a pair of hands to feed itself
+into the insatiable maw of the electric sewing-machine. Every face,
+tense and stony, bespoke a superb effort to concentrate mind and body,
+and soul itself, literally upon the point of a needle. Every form was
+crouched in the effort to guide the seam through the presser-foot. And
+piled between the opposing phalanxes of set faces were billows upon
+billows of foamy white muslin and lace--the finished garments wrought by
+the so-many dozen per hour, for the so-many cents per day,--and wrought,
+too, in this terrific, nerve-racking noise.
+
+The foreman led us into the middle of the room, which was lighted by
+gas-jets that hung directly over the girls' heads, although the ends of
+the shop had bright sunshine from the windows. He seemed a good-natured,
+respectable sort of man, of about forty, and was a Jew. Bessie and me he
+placed at machines side by side, and Eunice a little farther down the
+line. Then my first lesson began. He showed me how to thread bobbin and
+needle, how to operate ruffler and tucker, and also how to turn off and
+on the electric current which operated the machinery. My first attempt
+to do the latter was productive of a shock to the nerves that could not
+have been greater if, instead of pressing the harmless little lever
+under the machine with my knee, I had accidently exploded a bomb. The
+foreman laughed good-naturedly at my fright.
+
+"You'll get used to it by and by," he shouted above the noise; "but like
+as not for a while you won't sleep very good nights--kind of nervous;
+but you'll get over that in a week or so," and he ducked his head under
+the machine to adjust the belt. Suddenly, above all the frenzied
+crashing of the machines came a sound, half scream, half cackle:
+
+"Yi! yi! my pretty one, you'll get used to it by and by; you'll get used
+to anything in this world." It was an old woman's voice, and looking
+across the table, I saw a merry-eyed, toothless old crone, who was
+grinning and nodding at me.
+
+"Hello! hello there, Miriam! what's eating you now?" shouted the
+foreman, emerging and scrambling to his feet as he turned to get Bessie
+started. But the strange old creature only grinned wider and screeched,
+"Yi! yi!" louder than ever.
+
+But I had not time, either, to look at or listen to her now, as I leaned
+over the machine and practised at running a straight seam. Ah, the skill
+of these women and girls, and of the strange creature opposite, who can
+make a living at this torturing labor! How very different, how
+infinitely harder it is, as compared with running an ordinary
+sewing-machine. The goods that my nervous fingers tried to guide ran
+every wrong way. I had no control whatever over the fearful velocity
+with which the needle danced along the seam. In utter discouragement, I
+stopped trying for a moment, and watched the girl at my right. She was a
+swarthy, thick-lipped Jewess, of the type most common in such places,
+but I looked at her with awe and admiration. In Rachel Goldberg's case
+the making of muslin, lace-trimmed corset-covers was an art rather than
+a craft. She was a remarkable operator even among scores of experts at
+the R----. Under her stubby, ill-kept hands ruffles and tucks and
+insertion bands and lace frills were wrought with a beauty and softness
+of finish, and a speed and precision of workmanship, that made her the
+wonder and envy of the shop. And with what ease she seemed to do
+it all, despite the riveted eyes and tense-drawn muscles of her
+expressionless face! Suddenly her machine stopped, she looked
+up with a loud yawn, and stretched her arms above her head. She
+acknowledged the flattery of my look with a patronizing smile and a
+"How-do-you-think-you're-going-to-like-your-job?" I answered the
+conventional question in the usual way, and remarked that she sewed as
+if she had done it for ever and ever, and as if it were no work at all.
+
+She shook her head. "Yes, I've worked a long time at it, but my shoulder
+aches as bad this morning as it did when I was a learner like you," and
+she pressed the power-lever and again bent over the tucking.
+
+At my left Bessie was also practising on running seams, and a little
+farther down we saw poor Eunice struggling at the same hopeless lesson.
+The foreman, whose name proved to be Isaacs,--"Abe" Isaacs,--brought us
+our first "lot" of work. Mine consisted of six dozen coarse muslin
+corset-covers, which were already seamed together, and which I was
+shown how to "finish" with an embroidery yoke and ruffled edging about
+the arm's-eye. There is no basting, no pinning together of pieces; all
+the work is free-hand, and must be done with infinite exactness. I must
+hold the embroidery and the finishing strips of beading on the edge of
+the muslin with an exact nicety that will insure the edges of all three
+being caught in one seam; a process difficult enough on any
+sewing-machine, under any circumstances, but doubly so when the lightest
+touch sends the three-ply fabric under the needle with an incalculable
+velocity. Result of my first hour's work: I had spoiled a dozen
+garments. Try as I would, I invariably lost all control of my materials,
+and the needle plunged right and left--everywhere, in fact, except along
+the straight and narrow way laid out for it. And, to make matters still
+worse, I was painfully conscious that my old woman vis-a-vis was
+laughing at my distress with her irritating "Yi, yi!"
+
+As I spoiled each garment I thrust it into the bottom of a green
+pasteboard box under the table, which held my allotment of work, and
+from the top of the box grabbed up a fresh piece. I glanced over my
+shoulder and saw that Bessie was doing the same thing, although what we
+were going to do with them, or how account for such wholesale
+devastation of goods, we were too perturbed to consider. At last,
+however, after repeated trials, and by guiding the seam with laborious
+care, I succeeded in completing one garment without disaster; and I had
+just started another, when--crash!--flying shuttles and spinning bobbins
+and swirling wheels came to a standstill. My sewing-machine was silent,
+as were all the others in the great workroom. Something had happened to
+the dynamo.
+
+There was a howl of disappointment.
+
+"Yi, yi!" screamed the old woman, throwing up her hands in a gesture of
+unutterable disgust; and then, catching my eye, her wrinkled old lips
+parted in a smile of friendly interest.
+
+"How many did ye bungle?" she chuckled, leaning over and looking
+furtively up and down the room, as if afraid of being caught talking to
+me. I blushed in confusion that was half fright, and she raised a
+forefinger menacingly:
+
+"Yi! yi! ye thought I didn't see ye sneaking the spoiled truck into the
+green box; but old Miriam's got sharp eyes, she has, and she likes to
+watch you young uns when you comes in first. You're not the only one.
+They all spoil lots before they learn to make a living out of it.
+There's lots like ye!" and stooping over, she drew a handful of my
+botched work out of the box and began to rip the stitching.
+
+"That's all right; I'm glad to help ye!" she protested. "And sure, if we
+don't help each other, who's a-going to help us poor devils, I'd like to
+know?"
+
+I, too, busied myself with the task of ripping, which I saw Bessie and
+Eunice were also doing; in fact, all the new-comers of the morning could
+be thus singled out. The practised hands availed themselves of the
+enforced rest by yawning and stretching their arms, and by comparing the
+earnings of the morning; for we all worked on piece-work. Rachel
+Goldberg had finished four dozen of extra-fine garments, which meant
+seventy-five cents, and it was not yet eleven o'clock. She would make at
+least one dollar and sixty cents before the day was over, provided we
+did not have any serious breakdowns. She watched the clock
+impatiently,--every minute she was idle meant a certain fraction of a
+penny lost,--and crouched sullenly over her machine for the signal.
+
+"What are you thinking about, Miriam?" a frowsy-headed girl asked,
+giving the wink to the crowd.
+
+The generous-hearted old lady looked up from the task she was helping
+me to do, and raising her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the
+gaslight, peered down the long line of girls until she placed the
+speaker.
+
+"Yi, yi! Ye want to know what I'm thinking about? Well, mebbe, Beckie
+Frankenstein, I'm thinking what a beautiful world this is, and what a
+fine time you and me has," and the strange creature broke into a laugh
+that was more terrible than a sob.
+
+"Ah, there you go again, Miriam! What's eatin' you to-day?" cried the
+foreman, as he came along to inspect the work; and seeing Miriam undoing
+my blunders, asked, "Who did that?"
+
+Before I could put in a half-frightened acknowledgment, my intercessor
+had spoken up:
+
+"And whose 'u'd them be but mine, Abe Isaacs?"--scowling at me to keep
+silence when I opened my mouth to contradict her.
+
+The foreman looked incredulous. "You, Miriam! Do you mean to tell me it
+was you spoiled all that work? What's the matter with you to-day,
+anyway? If you don't do better, I'll have to fire you."
+
+There was a good-natured tone, a kindly compassion, in Abe Isaacs's
+voice which was not in accord with the words; and when he turned and
+asked me what I had done, there was no fear in my heart. I answered by
+looking significantly at old Miriam.
+
+"I thought as much," he muttered under his breath, and passed on to
+Bessie.
+
+"Poor old Miriam, she's teched up here," one of the girls explained,
+tapping her forehead. "They say it was the old sweat-shops put her out
+of her mind, and I guess it's so, all right. My mother knows two ladies
+that was made crazy sewing pants up to Sternberg's. But that was long
+ago, when they used to treat the girls so bad. Things is ever so much
+better now, only Miriam can't get used to the improvements. She's a
+hundred years behind the times."
+
+I was still lost in admiring wonder of Rachel Goldberg's skill. I asked
+her how long it would take me to learn to do it as well. She did not
+have a chance to answer before a harsh laugh was heard and a new voice
+asserted itself.
+
+"Oh-ho! you'll never learn to work like her, and you'd better find it
+out now. I seen you running your machine, and I says to myself, 'That
+girl 'll never make her salt making underclothes.' Pants 'd be more in
+your line. To make money on muslin you've got to be born to 't."
+
+"That's no lie, either," muttered another.
+
+"You bet it ain't!" declared the expert Rachel. "My mother was working
+on shirts for a straight ten months before I was born."
+
+In half an hour we had resumed work, and at half-past twelve we stopped
+for another half-hour and ate luncheon--Bessie, Eunice, and I in a
+corner by ourselves.
+
+We held a conference, and compared notes of the morning's progress,
+which had been even more discouraging to poor Eunice than to us; for to
+her it had brought the added misfortune of a row of stitches in her
+right forefinger. We counted up our profits for the morning, and the
+aggregate earnings of the three of us did not amount to ten cents. Of
+course we would learn to do better, but it would take a long, long time,
+Bessie was firmly convinced, before we could even make enough to buy our
+lunches. It was decided that one of us should resign the job that night,
+and the other two keep at it until the delegate found something better
+for us all and had tested the new job to her satisfaction. Bessie was of
+course appointed, and the next morning Eunice and I went alone, with
+plausible excuses for the absent Bessie, for we had a certain delicacy
+about telling the real facts to so kind a foreman as "Abe."
+
+The second day we had no better luck, and the pain between the
+shoulder-blades was unceasing. All night long I had tossed on my narrow
+cot, with aching back and nerves wrought up to such a tension that the
+moment I began to doze off I was wakened by a spasmodic jerk of the
+right arm as it reached forward to grasp a visionary strip of lace. That
+evening, as we filed out at six o'clock, Bessie was waiting for us, her
+gentle face full of radiance and good news. Even the miserable Eunice
+was affected by her hopefulness.
+
+"Oh, girls, I've got something that's really good--three dollars a week
+while you're learning, and an awful nice shop; and just think,
+girls!--the hours--I never had anything like it before, and I've knocked
+around at eighteen different jobs--half-past eight to five, and--" she
+paused for breath to announce the glorious fact--"Girls, just think of
+it!--_Saturday afternoons off_, all the year round."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+IN WHICH A TRAGIC FATE OVERTAKES MY "LADY-FRIENDS"
+
+
+The next morning we met on the corner, as usual, and Bessie led us to
+our new job--led us through a world that was strange and new to both
+Eunice and me, though poor Eunice had little heart for the newness and
+the strangeness of it all. In and out, and criss-cross, we threaded our
+way through little narrow streets bordered with stately "sky-scrapers,"
+and at last turned into Maiden Lane. We walked arm in arm till we came
+to an alley which Bessie said was Gold Street. It is more of a zigzag
+even than Maiden Lane, and is flanked by dark iron-shuttered warehouses
+and factories. Wolff's, our destination, was at the head of the street,
+and in a few minutes we were sitting side by side at the work-table,
+while our new forewoman, a cross-eyed Irish girl, was showing us what to
+do and how to do it.
+
+Making jewel-and silverware-cases was now our work. In the long,
+whitewashed workroom there were thirty other girls performing the same
+task, and on each of the five floors beneath there were as many more
+girls, pasting and pressing and trimming cases that were to hold rings,
+watches and bracelets, and spoons, knives, and forks--enough to supply
+all Christendom, it seemed to me. As beginners we were given each a
+dozen spoon-boxes to cover with white leather and line with satin. It is
+light, pleasant work, and was such an improvement on the sweat-shop
+drudgery that even Eunice smiled a little after a while.
+
+"Is youse lady-friends?" the forewoman asked when, in the course of ten
+minutes, she came to inspect our progress; on receiving an affirmative
+reply, she scowled.
+
+"Fiddlesticks! If I'd knowed youse was lady-friends, I'd jist told Izzy
+he could get some other girls," and she walked off, still scowling. The
+girls about us giggled.
+
+"Why doesn't Miss Gibbs like us to be lady-friends?" asked Bessie.
+
+A young Italian answered, "Because they always git to scrappin'."
+
+We all laughed--even Eunice--at such an ending to our friendship.
+
+"We had a fearful row here yisterday," spoke up another; "and they wuz
+lady-friends--thicker than sardines, they wuz--till they got on the outs
+about a feller down on Pearl Street; a diamond-cutter he wuz, and they
+wuz both mashed on him--a Dutchman, too, he wuz, that wore ear-rings. I
+couldn't get mashed on a Dutchman, ear-rings or no ear-rings, could
+you?"
+
+"What did they do?" asked Bessie.
+
+"Do! They snapped at each other all morning over the work-table, and
+then one of them called the other a name that wuz something awful, and
+she up and spit in her face for it."
+
+"Well, I don't blame that girl for spitting in her face," interrupted a
+voice. "I don't blame her; lady-like or not lady-like, I'd have done the
+same thing. I'd spit in the President's face if I was in the White House
+and he was to call me such a name!"
+
+"And then what happened?" asked Bessie.
+
+"Oh, they just up and at each other like two cats, tumbling over a stack
+of them there white velvet necklace-cases, and bloodying up each other's
+faces something fierce; and then Miss Gibbs she called Izzy; and Izzy he
+fired them on the spot."
+
+Despite these tales of strenuous conflicts, we were happy in our work at
+Wolff's. Our shop-mates were quiet, decent-looking girls, and their
+conversation was conspicuously clean--not always a characteristic of
+their class. Miss Gibbs, despite her justifiable prejudice against
+lady-friends, proved not unkind, and we congratulated ourselves as we
+bent over our work and listened to the cheerful hum of voices.
+
+After each case was finished,--after the satin linings and interlinings
+and the tuftings had been fitted and glued into their proper places, and
+the bit of leather drawn across the padded cover,--we could raise our
+eyes for a moment and look out upon a strange, fascinating world. The
+open windows on one side of the shop looked into the polishing-room of a
+neighboring goldsmith, and on the other side into a sunshiny workroom
+filled with swirling black wheels and flying belts among which the
+workmen kept up a dialogue in a foreign tongue. The latter place was
+near enough for a good-looking young man to attempt a flirtation with
+Bessie, in such moments as he was not carefully watching what seemed to
+be a clumsy mass of wax on the end of a wooden handle. All the long
+forenoon he kept up his manoeuvers, watching his ugly bludgeon as if it
+were the very apple of his eye; carrying it to the window one moment and
+examining it under the microscope; then carrying it back to his wheel
+and beginning all over again. Late in the afternoon he came to the
+window for the hundredth time, and brandishing the bludgeon so that the
+sunshine fell directly upon it, held it aloft for us to admire the great
+glittering gem that now sparkled deep-bedded in the ugly wax.
+
+"I gif you dat if you marry me!" cried the diamond-cutter, striking a
+dramatic attitude for Bessie's benefit.
+
+Thus one, two days passed swiftly, and we had learned to make
+jewel-cases with tolerable rapidity. We had a half-hour for luncheon,
+during which Bessie, Eunice, and I went off by ourselves to the rear of
+the shop, where we ate our sandwiches in silence and gazed out upon the
+forest of masts that filled the East River lying below.
+
+On the fourth day Eunice and I ate luncheon alone. Bessie did not come
+that morning, nor send any excuse. Her absence gave me an opportunity,
+in this half-hour's respite from work, to get better acquainted with my
+silent and mysterious fellow-boarder; anything more than a most meager
+acquaintance was impossible at the place where we lived. Like the
+majority of semi-charitable institutions, the "home" was conducted on
+the theory that the only safety to morals, as well as to pocket-books,
+was espionage and isolation.
+
+"It's awful up there, isn't it?" she remarked suddenly after we had
+discussed every possible cause for Bessie's absence.
+
+"Yes, isn't it?" I replied, somewhat surprised, for this was the first
+time the girl had ever expressed any opinion about anything, so fearful
+did she seem of betraying herself.
+
+"I suppose you often wonder what brought me there that night?" she went
+on. "You've told me your story, and you don't know anything at all about
+mine. You must often wonder, though you are too considerate to ask. But
+I'm going to tell you now without asking. It was to keep me from going
+there," pointing through the window down to the river.
+
+"I'd had a lot of trouble,--oh, a terrible lot of trouble,--and it
+seemed as if there wasn't any place for me; and I walked down to the
+edge of the river up there at the end of East Fourteenth Street, and
+something stopped me just when I was ready to jump in. Why I didn't, I
+don't know," and the girl turned a stony face to the window.
+
+"Why, it was hope and renewed courage, of course!" I replied quickly.
+"Everybody gets blue spells--when one is down on one's luck."
+
+Eunice shook her head. "No, it wasn't hope. It was because I was
+afraid--it was because I'm a coward. I'm too much of a coward to live,
+and I'm too much of a coward to die. You never felt as I do. You
+couldn't. I've lost my grip on everything. Everything's gone against me,
+and it's too late now for things to change. You don't know--_you don't
+know_, you and Bessie. If you did, you'd see how useless all your
+kindness is, in trying to get me to brace up. I've tried--my God! I have
+tried to feel that there's a life before me, but I can't--I can't.
+Sometimes, maybe for a minute, I'll forget what's gone by, and then the
+next minute the memory of it all comes back with a fearful stab. There
+is something that won't let me forget."
+
+"Hush! Eunice; don't talk so loud," I whispered as her passionate voice
+rose above the hum of the other girls in a far portion of the room.
+
+"I tell you it's no use--it's no use. I've lost my grip on things, and I
+can never catch hold again. I thought, maybe, when I started out with
+you and Bessie, and got to working again, there'd be a change. But there
+isn't any difference now from--from the night I went into that dormitory
+first. Now with you it would be different. What's happened to me might,
+maybe, happen to you; but you could fight it down. There's something
+inside of you that's stronger than anything that can hurt you from the
+outside. Most girls are that way. They get hurt--and hurt bad, and they
+cry a lot at the time and are miserable and unhappy; but after a while
+they succeed in picking themselves up, and are in the end as good,
+sometimes better, than ever. They forget in a little while all about it,
+and wind up by marrying some man who is really in love with them, and
+they are as happy as if nothing had ever happened."
+
+I looked at the occupant of cot No. 11 with mingled feelings of pity and
+amazement--pity for the hopelessness of her case, now more apparent than
+ever; amazement at her keen and morbid generalizations.
+
+"How old are you, Eunice?"
+
+"Twenty-four," she replied--"oh, I know what you're going to say: that I
+have my whole life before me, and all that. But I haven't. My life is
+all behind me."
+
+
+     "'I am the Captain of my Soul,
+     I am the Master of my Fate,'"
+
+
+I quoted.
+
+"Yes, you are; but I am not," she replied simply, and turned and looked
+at me with her hopeless eyes.
+
+Poor, unfortunate Eunice! That night, as we walked home together, she
+revealed a little more about herself by telling me that she had recently
+been discharged from the hospital on "the Island." I did not need to
+inquire the nature of the illness that had left her face so white and
+drawn. Brief as my experience had been among the humble inmates of the
+"home," I had learned the expediency of not being too solicitous
+regarding the precise facts of such cases.
+
+The next day was Saturday, and still no Bessie. As we worked we
+speculated as to her absence, and decided to spend the afternoon looking
+her up. Meanwhile, although I had been managing to do my work a little
+better each day, Eunice had not been succeeding so well. Her apathy had
+been increasing daily, until she had lost any interest she might ever
+have had in trying to do her work well. On this morning the forewoman
+was obliged to give her repeated and sharp reproofs for soiling her
+materials and for dawdling over her work.
+
+"You seem to like to work," Eunice said once, breaking a long silence.
+
+"Not any better than you do, only I've got to, and I try to make the
+best of it."
+
+"Yes, you do. You like to work, and I don't, and that's the difference
+between us. And it's all the difference in the world, too. If I liked
+work for its own sake, like you do, there'd be some hope for me living
+things down."
+
+"I wonder," she whispered, again breaking a long silence--"I wonder if
+Bessie had any man after her."
+
+I looked up suddenly, perhaps indignantly, and my reply was not
+encouraging to any conjectures along this line, as Eunice saw quickly.
+
+"I'm sorry I offended you," she added hastily; "but I didn't think
+anything wrong of Bessie--you know I didn't. Only I've watched the boss
+following her around with his eyes ever since we came here to work. You
+didn't see, for you don't know as much about their devilment as I do;
+but I tell you, if anything was ever to happen that poor little girl
+through any man, I'd choke him to death with my own hands!"
+
+The satin-tufted box she was working on dropped from her fingers and
+clattered on the floor, bringing the forewoman down upon her with many
+caustic remarks. When the flurry was over I assured her that I thought
+Bessie fully capable of taking care of herself, although I had seen more
+of the manager's advances than Eunice gave me credit for observing.
+
+At last noon came, and with it our first half-holiday. With the first
+shriek of the whistle we jumped up and began folding our aprons,
+preparatory to rushing out to find Bessie.
+
+"Where does she live?" asked Eunice.
+
+I looked at her in blank amazement, for I didn't know. I had never even
+heard the name of the street. I knew it was somewhere on the East Side;
+that was all. In all our weeks of acquaintanceship no occasion had
+arisen whereby Bessie should mention where she lived. I thought of
+Rosenfeld's. Perhaps some one there might know, and we took a Broadway
+car up-town. But Miss Higgins was away on her vacation, and none of the
+girls who still remained in the flower-shop knew any more about Bessie's
+whereabouts than I did. Thus it is in the busy, workaday world. Nobody
+knows where you come from, and nobody knows where you go. Eunice
+suggested looking in the directory; but as we found forty of the same
+name, it seemed hopeless. I did happen to know, however, that her father
+had once been a cutter or tailor; and so out of the forty we selected
+all the likeliest names and began a general canvass. After five hours of
+weary search, and after climbing the stairs of more than a score of
+tenement-houses, without success, we turned at last into East Broadway,
+footsore and dusty. In this street, on the fifth floor of a baking
+tenement, we tapped at the door of Bessie's home. A little blonde woman
+answered the knock, and when we asked for Bessie she burst into sobs and
+pointed to a red placard on the door--the quarantine notice of the Board
+of Health, which we had not seen. And then Bessie's mother told us that
+four of her brood had been laid low with malignant diphtheria. The three
+younger ones were home, sick unto death, but they had yielded to the
+entreaties of the doctor and allowed him to take Bessie to Bellevue.
+Thither we hurried as fast as the trolley would take us, only to find
+the gates closed for the day. We were not relatives, we had no permits;
+and whether Bessie were dead or alive, we must wait until visiting-hours
+the next day to discover.
+
+What we found out the next day, when we filed into the superintendent's
+office with the ill-dressed horde of anxious Sunday-afternoon visitors,
+was hardly a surprise. We expected nothing but what Eunice had predicted
+from the first. Bessie had died the night before--died murmuring about
+poppies, the young doctor told us.
+
+"She's better off where she is than she'd be down at Wolff's," said
+Eunice, as we passed through the gates on to the street again. I made
+no comment, and we walked silently away from the big, ugly brick pile
+that holds such horrors for the poor. When we reached Third Avenue,
+Eunice stopped before a florist's window, and we looked in at a cluster
+of great white lilies. Neither spoke, however, and in a moment we passed
+on down Third Avenue, now brightly lighted and teeming with its usual
+gay Sunday night crowd. At last we turned into our own street, and were
+in front of the dark building we both called "home." Here Eunice caught
+my hand in hers, with a convulsive little motion, as might a child who
+was afraid of the dark. We climbed the stone steps together, and I
+pulled the bell, Eunice's grasp on my hand growing tighter and tighter.
+
+"Good-by; it's no use," she whispered suddenly, dropping my hand and
+moving away as we heard the matron fumbling at the lock; and before I
+could utter a word of protest, before I could reach forward and snatch
+her from some dread thing, I knew not what, she had disappeared among
+the shadows of the lamplit street.
+
+
+"Where's the other girl?" asked the matron.
+
+"I don't know," I replied,--nor have I since been able to find the
+faintest clue to her whereabouts, if living, or her fate, if dead. From
+that moment at the door-step when she said good-by, Eunice stepped out
+of my life as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed her
+up. Is she dead or alive? Did the unhappy girl seek self-destruction
+that June night, or was she swept into that great, black whirlpool, the
+name of which even a girl of the workaday world mentions always with
+bated breath? I do not know. I never expect to know the fate of Eunice.
+It is only in stories that such things are made clear, usually, and this
+was only an incident in real life.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+I BECOME A "SHAKER" IN A STEAM-LAUNDRY
+
+
+The next day, Monday, they buried Bessie in a big, shabby Jewish
+cemetery out on Long Island. I did not follow my comrade to the grave.
+Nor did I go to work. All that long, beautiful June day was spent in
+fruitless search for poor Eunice.
+
+This hopeless quest, begun on Monday, was continued for three days in
+the few hours that I could snatch between five o'clock, the closing-time
+at the shop, and ten o'clock, the curfew hour at the "home." On
+Wednesday the strain grew unbearable. All the associations of Wolff's
+were tinctured with memories of the dead Bessie and the lost Eunice.
+Under the counter, in the big pasteboard box, their checked-gingham
+aprons were still rolled up just as they had left them, with the
+scissors inside; and on the pine table under my eyes were their names
+and mine, scrawled in a lead-pencil by Bessie's hand, and framed with
+heavy lines. Their high stools, which were on either side of mine, had
+been given over to two new-comers, also "lady-friends," who chewed gum
+vigorously and discussed beaux and excursions to Coney Island with a
+happy vivacity that made my secret misery all the harder to bear. That
+night I went to the desk and drew my money, tucked the two aprons away
+in a bundle with my own, and said good-by to Wolff's. The sum total of
+my capital now amounted to five dollars; and with this I felt that I
+could afford to spend the remainder of the week trying to find Eunice,
+and trust to luck to get taken back at Wolff's the following Monday
+morning.
+
+After three days' systematic inquiry, I climbed the stairs to the
+dormitory late on Sunday night, no wiser than I had been a week before.
+My discouragement gave way to a thrill of joyous surprise when I
+descried a long, thin form stretched under the gray blanket of Eunice's
+cot. I sprang forward and laid an eager hand on the thin shoulder.
+
+"Gr-r-r! Don't you try gettin' fresh, Susie Jane, er I'll smash yer
+face!" snarled the angry voice of a new-comer, as she pulled the
+coverlet up to her eyes and rolled over on the other side.
+
+Monday morning I presented myself at the jewel-case factory, and asked
+Miss Gibbs to take me back. But I was already adjudged a "shiftless
+lot," not steady, and was accordingly "turned down." Then once more I
+scanned the advertising columns.
+
+"Shakers Wanted.--Apply to Foreman" was the first that caught my eye. I
+didn't know what a "shaker" was, but that did not deter me from forming
+a sudden determination to be one. The address took me into a street
+up-town--above Twenty-third Street--the exact locality I hesitate to
+give for reasons that shortly will become obvious. Here I found the
+"Pearl Laundry," a broad brick building, grim as a fortress, and
+fortified by a breastwork of laundry-wagons backed up to the curb and
+disgorging their contents of dirty clothes. Making my way as best I
+could through the jam of horses and drivers and baskets, I reached the
+narrow, unpainted pine door marked, "Employees' Entrance," and filed up
+the stairs with a crowd of other girls--all, like myself, seeking work.
+
+At the head of the stairs we filed into a mammoth steam-filled room that
+occupied an entire floor. The foreman made quick work of us. Thirty-two
+girls I counted as they stepped up to the pale-faced, stoop-shouldered
+young fellow, who addressed each one as "Sally," in a tone which,
+despite its good-natured familiarity, was none the less businesslike
+and respectful. At last it came my turn.
+
+"Hello, Sally! Ever shook?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Ever work in a laundry?"
+
+"No; but I'm very handy."
+
+"What did you work at last?"
+
+"Jewel-cases."
+
+"All right, Sally; we'll start you in at three and a half a week, and
+maybe we'll give you four dollars after you get broke in to the
+work.--Go over there, where you seen them other ladies go," he called
+after me as I moved away, and waved his hand toward a pine-board
+partition. Here, sitting on bundles of soiled linen and on hampers, my
+thirty-two predecessors were corralled, each awaiting assignment to
+duty. They were dressed, literally, "some in rags and some in tags and
+some in velvet gowns." Calico wrappers brushed against greasy satin
+skirts, and faded kimono dressing-jackets vied in filth and slovenliness
+with unbelted shirt-waists. A faded rose bobbed in one girl's head, and
+on another's locks was arranged a gorgeous fillet of pale-blue ribbon of
+the style advertised at the time in every shop-window in New York as the
+"Du Barry." The scene was a sorry burlesque on the boudoir and the
+ball-room, a grim travesty on the sordid realities of the kitchen on
+wash-day.
+
+"Did yez come in the barber's wagon?" asked a stupid Irish girl, looking
+at me curiously. I looked blank, and she repeated the question.
+
+"What does she mean?" I asked a more intelligent girl who was seated on
+a bundle in the corner.
+
+"Didn't yez come in Tony's wagon?"
+
+"No; who's Tony?"
+
+"Oh, Tony he's a barber--a Ginny barber--that goes out with a wagon when
+they run short of help, and he picks up any girls he can find and hauls
+them in. He brought three loads this morning. We thought Tony picked you
+up. Me and her," pointing to a black-browed girl who was nodding to
+sleep with her mouth wide open, "we come in the barber's wagon."
+
+The girl's face, fat, heavy, dough-colored, had become suffused with
+amiability, and giving her snoozing comrade a gentle push, she made room
+for me on the bundle beside her.
+
+"Ever worked at this job before?" she asked.
+
+"No. Have you?"
+
+She replied with a sharp laugh, and flinging back the sleeve of her
+kimono, thrust out the stump of a wrist. At my exclamation of horror,
+she grinned.
+
+"Why, that's nothing in this here business," she said. "It happens
+every wunst in a while, when you was running the mangles and was tired.
+That's the way it was with me: I was clean done out, one Saturday night,
+and I jist couldn't see no more; and first thing I know--Wo-o-ow! and
+that hand went right straight clean into the rollers. And I was jist
+tired, that's all. I didn't have nothing to drink all that day,
+excepting pop; but the boss he swore I was drunk, and he made the
+foreman swear the same thing, and so I didn't try to get no damages.
+They sent me to the horspital, and they offered me my old job back
+again; but I jist got up my spunk and says if they can't pay me some
+damages, and goes and swears I was drunk when I didn't have nothing but
+rotten pop, I says, I can up and go some place else and get my four
+dollars a week."
+
+Before I could ask what the poor creature would be able to do with only
+one hand, the foreman appeared in the door, and we trooped out at his
+heels. Down the length of the big room, through a maze of moving
+hand-trucks and tables and rattling mangles, we followed him to the
+extreme rear, where he deposited us, in groups of five and six, at the
+big tables that were ranged from wall to wall and heaped high with wet
+clothes, still twisted just as they were turned out of the
+steam-wringer. An old woman with a bent back showed me the very simple
+process of "shaking."
+
+"Jist take the corners like this,"--suiting the action to the
+word,--"and give a shake like this, and pile them on top o' one
+another--like this," and with that she turned to her own "shaking" and
+resumed gossip with her side-partner, another old woman, who was roundly
+denouncing the "trash" that was being thrust upon her as table-mates,
+and throwing out palpable insults to the "Ginnies" who stood vis-a-vis,
+and who either didn't hear or, hearing, didn't understand or care.
+
+For the first half-hour I shook napkins bearing the familiar
+legend--woven in red--of a ubiquitous dairy-lunch place, and the next
+half-hour was occupied with bed-linen bearing the mark of a famous
+hostelry. During that time I had become fairly accustomed to my new
+surroundings, and was now able to distinguish, out of the steamy
+turmoil, the general features of a place that seethed with life and
+action. All the workers were women and girls, with the exception of the
+fifteen big, black, burly negroes who operated the tubs and the wringers
+which were ranged along the rear wall on a platform that ran parallel
+with and a little behind the shakers' tables. The negroes were stripped
+to the waist of all save a thin gauze undershirt. There was something
+demoniacal in their gestures and shouts as they ran about the vats of
+boiling soap-suds, from which they transferred the clothes to the
+swirling wringers, and then dumped them at last upon the big trucks. The
+latter were pushed away by relays of girls, who strained at the heavy
+load. The contents of the trucks were dumped first on the shakers'
+tables, and when each piece was smoothed out we--the shakers--redumped
+the stacks into the truck, which was pushed on to the manglers, who
+ironed it all out in the hot rolls. So, after several other dumpings and
+redumpings, the various lots were tied and labeled.
+
+Meanwhile a sharp, incessant pain had grown out of what was in the first
+ten or fifteen minutes a tired feeling in the arms--that excruciating,
+nerve-torturing pain which comes as a result of a ceaseless muscular
+action that knows no variation or relaxation. To forget it, I began to
+watch the eight others at our particular table. There were four
+Italians, all stupid, uninteresting-looking girls, of anywhere from
+fifteen to twenty-five years old; there was a thin, narrow-chested girl,
+with delicate wrists and nicely shaped hands, who seemed far superior
+to her companions, and who might have been pretty had it not been for
+the sunken, blue-black cavity where one eye should have been; there was
+a fat woman of forty, with a stiff neck, and of a religious temperament,
+who worked in a short under-petticoat and was stolidly indifferent to
+the conversation round her; the others were the two old dames--she who
+had initiated me, and her sprightlier though not less ancient crony,
+Mrs. Mooney. Both fairly bristled with spite and vindictiveness toward
+everything in general, and us new-comers in particular, and each
+sustained her flagging energies with frequent pinches of snuff and
+chunks of coffee-cake which they drew from inexhaustible pockets. My
+attempts at conversation with these two having been met with chilling
+silence, and as Mrs. Mooney had given me several painful thrusts with
+her sharp elbow when I happened to get too close to her, I took care to
+keep a safe distance, puzzled as to wherein I might have offended, and
+lapsing into a morbid interest in the gossip flying thick and fast
+around me.
+
+The target of scandal was "the queen," a big, handsome blonde girl of
+about twenty-five, who in a different environment and properly corseted
+and gowned would have been set down unquestionably as "a voluptuous
+beauty." Here in the laundry, in stocking-feet and an unbelted black
+shirt-waist turned far in at the neck, she was merely "mushy," to use
+the adjective of her detractors. The queen owed her nickname to the
+boss, with whom she was said to "stand in," being "awful soft after
+him." She was a sort of assistant to the foreman, bossing the job when
+he was not around, and lending a hand in rush hours with true democratic
+simplicity such as only the consciousness of her prestige could warrant
+her in doing. Now she was assisting the black men load a truck, now
+helping a couple of girls push it across the floor, now helping us dump
+it on the table--laughing and joking all the while, but at the same time
+goading us on to the very limit of human endurance. She had been in the
+"Pearl" for seven years, slaved harder than any of us, and she looked as
+fresh and buoyant as if she never had known what work was. I rather
+liked the queen, despite the fact that I detected in her immediately a
+relentless task-master; everybody else seemed to like her,
+notwithstanding the malicious things they said about her.
+
+"Tired?" asked the one-eyed girl. "Yes, it's hard work, but it's steady.
+You're never out of a job if you're a steady shaker that can be relied
+on."
+
+There was cheerfulness in her tone, and both the old women stopped
+talking.
+
+"Did yez come in the barber's wagon?" Mrs. Mooney asked. On being
+assured that we had not, she proceeded to establish amicable relations
+with the one-eyed girl and me by telling us she was glad we "weren't
+Ginnies, anyway."
+
+"Whatever happened to yer eye?" inquired the other crone of my
+companion.
+
+Unresentful of the blunt inquisitiveness, the girl responded cordially
+with her little story--glad, apparently, to have a listener.
+
+"It was something I caught in the hospital when I had appendicitis three
+years ago. When I was discharged my appendicitis was well, but my eye
+had took sore. The doctor he says when he seen it, 'That eye's too far
+gone, and it's got to come out, or the poison 'll spread to the t'other
+eye, and then you won't have no eyes at all.' My mother she didn't know
+nothing about it till it was all over. She'd have carried on awful if
+she'd knowed it. But it didn't hurt a bit. I went under chloroform, and
+when I come out of it I jist thought I'd been having a long sleep in a
+big brass bedstead, with hem-stitched sheets and things like that," and
+she pointed to the hotel linen we were all shaking.
+
+"That's the way with them hospitals," said Mrs. Mooney,
+sympathetically, and proffering the heroine of the story a chunk of
+spice-cake.
+
+"You'd been better to ha' stayed at home. Poor folks don't have no
+chanst in them high-toned places."
+
+"Why don't you take off yer shoes like us, and let yer feet spread
+out?--it'll rest them," suggested Mrs. Mooney, now passing me a
+peace-offering of coffee-cake, and tightening her mouth in a grim
+determination to be civil.
+
+Indeed, the one-eyed girl's story had wrought a transformation in these
+two sullen old women. All that was human in them had been touched by the
+tale of physical suffering, and we now met on common ground--the common
+ground of brute sympathy which one animal feels for another in distress.
+
+The work was now under full blast, and every one of the hundred and
+twenty-five girls worked with frenzied energy as the avalanche of
+clothes kept falling in upon us and were sent with lightning speed
+through the different processes, from the tubs to the packers' counters.
+Nor was there any abatement of the snowy landslide--not a moment to stop
+and rest the aching arms. Just as fast as the sweating negroes could
+unload the trucks into the tubs, more trucks came rolling in from the
+elevator, and the foaming tubs swirled perpetually, swallowing up, it
+would seem, all the towels and pillow-cases and napkins in Greater New
+York. Above the orchestra of noise I distinguished a faintly familiar
+voice, which I could not place until I heard:
+
+"And it was nothing but pop I had that day--I hadn't had nothing but
+rotten old pop all day!"
+
+From the girl's argument it was hard to determine whether she was more
+grieved at not having had stronger potations than pop on that fatal
+occasion, or at the implied aspersions upon her character for sobriety.
+Looking up, I saw that she was in one of the truck-teams. She had her
+one hand and arm strained against the rear of the sodden load, which she
+was urging forward with her hip. The load happened to be for our table,
+and as we dumped it out I asked her if there wasn't anything easier she
+could do. She responded cheerily:
+
+"No. You've got to have two hands to run the mangles, and you've got to
+have two hands to shake, and you've got to have two hands to tie up, but
+you can push a truck with one hand." Which statement of the case,
+combined with the cripple's optimism, made us laugh--all except the
+one-eyed girl, espying whom, the maimed girl suddenly changed the tone
+of levity with which she treated her own misfortune, and asked in a
+lowered voice: "What's the matter with yer eye?" And the hospital
+infection tale was repeated.
+
+Could a duchess have claimed greater grace than that poor, unlettered,
+uncouth creature's delicate perception of that subtle principle of
+courtesy, which allowed her to jest over her own misfortunes, but which
+prompted a gentle hesitation in speaking to another about hers!
+
+In the excruciating agony of the hours that followed, the trucks became
+a veritable anodyne for the pains that shot through my whole body.
+Leaning over their deep sides was a welcome relief from the strained,
+monotonous position at the tables. The one-eyed girl had likewise
+discovered the anodyne, and remarked upon it once as we dived into the
+wet freight.
+
+"It's so funny how one kind of pain sort of eases up another," she said;
+"I always feel good every time I see the truck coming, though trucking's
+far harder work than shaking if you had to do it steady. I wonder why it
+is. It was the same way with my eye. When it was getting better and just
+ached a little bit, steady, all the time, I used to wish I could have
+real hard jumping toothache, just for a change."
+
+"God love ye, and it's so," fervently exclaimed Mrs. Mooney.
+
+The day was terrifically hot outdoors, and with the fearful heat that
+came up through the floor from the engine-room directly under us,
+combined with the humidity of the steam-tilled room, we were all driven
+to a state of half-dress before the noon hour arrived. The women opened
+their dresses at the neck and cast off their shoes, and the foreman
+threw his suspenders off his shoulders, while the colored washers
+paddled about on the sloppy floor in their bare black feet.
+
+"Don't any men work in this place except the foreman?" I asked Mrs.
+Mooney, who had toiled a long time in the "Pearl" and knew everything.
+
+"Love of Mary!" she exclaimed indignantly; "and d' ye think any white
+man that called hisself a white man would work in sich a place as this,
+and with naygurs?"
+
+"But we work here," I argued.
+
+"Well, we be wimmin," she declared, drawing a pinch of snuff into her
+nostrils in a manner that indicated finality.
+
+"But if it isn't good enough for a man, it isn't good enough for us,
+even if we are women!" I persisted.
+
+She looked at me half in astonishment, half in suspicion at my daring to
+question the time-honored order of things. Economics could make no
+appeal to her intelligence, and shooting a glance out of her hard old
+black eyes, she replied with a logic that permitted no gainsaying.
+
+"Love of Mary! if yez don't like yer job, ye can git out. Sure and we
+don't take on no airs around here!"
+
+At twelve the noise ceased, and a shrill whistle ushered in the
+half-hour's respite. The effect of that raucous shriek was as solemn, as
+awe-inspiring, for the first moment, as the ringing of the Angelus bell
+in a Catholic country-side. For one moment everybody stood motionless
+and mute, the women with arms akimbo on aching hips, the black washers
+with drooping, relaxed shoulders. Each tortured frame seemed to heave
+with an inaudible "Thank God!" and then we slowly scattered in all
+directions--some to the cloak-room, where the lunches were stored along
+with the wraps, some down the stairs into the street.
+
+On this day the one-eyed girl and I found a bundle of clothes large
+enough for two to sit on, and shared our lunch. For half a ham sandwich
+she gave me a piece of cold sausage, and I gave her a dill pickle for a
+greasy doughnut. The inevitable bottle of "pop" neither of us was able
+to open until the foreman came along and lent his assistance. He
+lingered a moment to talk the usual inanities that pass between a
+democratic foreman and a couple of new girls. Under his jovial exterior
+there seemed to be a vein of seriousness, amounting almost to sadness
+when one looked at his well-modeled face and his steady gray eyes. Tall
+and pale and prematurely bent, he had a certain distinction, as if he
+had been cut out for better things. His manner had lost all the easy
+familiarity of a few hours before, and he asked us in the kindest tone
+possible how we liked the work, and heartened us with the assurance that
+it wouldn't be nearly so hard in a few days, telling us to "stand
+slack-like" and see if it didn't make the pain in our backs better. By
+slack-like he meant stoop-shouldered, as everybody grows sooner or later
+in a laundry.
+
+The foreman's hygienic lecture was interrupted by the warning rumble of
+the awakening machinery, and we scurried back to our table to make
+practical test of his theory. We followed it to the letter, but, like
+every other palliative of pain, it soon lost its virtue, and the long
+afternoon was one of unspeakable agony. There were now not only aching
+backs and arms and legs, but feet parboiled to a blister on the burning
+floors. The air was rent with lamentations, and before long my
+side-partner and I had also shed our shoes. By four o'clock everybody
+had sunk into a state of apathetic quiet, and even the exuberant Queen
+lost something of her vivaciousness, and attended strictly to the
+business of goading us on to our tasks.
+
+"We're two days behind with them hospital sheets," she screamed to one
+relay; "S---- Hotel Barber Shop got to go out to-night," which
+information brought groans from Mrs. Mooney.
+
+"Mother of God!" she cried. "Sure and that means nine o'clock to-night."
+
+"Aren't we going to get out at six?" asked the one-eyed girl, while I
+glanced dismally at the never-ending train of trucks that kept rolling
+out upon the washers' platform, faster now than at any other time of the
+day.
+
+"God love ye! dearie, no," returned Mrs. Mooney. "Ye'll never get
+outside _this_ shop at six any night, unless ye're carried out dead.
+We're in luck to get out as early as eight."
+
+"Every night?"
+
+"Sure, every night exceptin' Saturday, and then it's twelve to
+half-past one."
+
+"Oh, that's not so bad if you have a half-holiday."
+
+"Half-holiday!" echoed Mrs. Mooney. "Will ye listen to that! A
+half-holiday, indeed!" Then the mocking voice grew kinder. "Sure and
+it's every minute of twelve o'clock or a half-hour into Sunday mornin'
+afore you ever see the outside of this place of a Saturday in
+summer-time, with all the washin' and ironin' for the summer hotels and
+the big bugs as is at the sea-shore."
+
+"Youse ain't got no kick coming," said one of the Ginney girls. "Youse
+gets six cents an hour overtime, and youse 'll be mighty glad to make
+that exter money!"
+
+Mrs. Mooney glared viciously at the interlopers. "Yes, and if it wasn't
+for the likes of yez Ginnies that 'll work for nothing and live in
+pig-pens, the likes of us white people wouldn't have to work nights."
+
+"Well I made ninety-six cents' overtime last week," spoke up the silent
+fat woman in the under-petticoat, "and I was thankful to the Lord to get
+it."
+
+Of the two hours or more that followed I have only a hazy recollection
+of colored men bending over the pungent foam, of straining, sweating
+women dragging their trucks round and round the great steaming-room. I
+remembered nothing whatever of the moment when the agony was ended and
+we were released for the day. Up to a certain dim borderland I remember
+that my back ached and that my feet dragged heavily over the burning
+floor, two pieces of boiling flesh. I do remember distinctly, however,
+suddenly waking up on Third Avenue as I was walking past a delicatessen
+store, and looking straight into the countenance of a pleasant-faced
+woman. I must have walked right into her, for she seemed amused, and
+went on her way laughing at something--probably my look of surprise as
+the impact brought me suddenly to full consciousness. A clock was
+hanging in the delicatessen-store window, and the hour-hand stood at
+nine. A cooling sea-breeze was blowing up from the south, and as I
+continued my walk home I realized that I had just passed out of a sort
+of trance,--a trance superinduced by physical misery,--a merciful
+subconscious condition of apathy, in which my soul as well as my body
+had taken refuge when torture grew unbearable.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+IN WHICH IT IS PROVED TO ME THAT THE DARKEST HOUR COMES JUST BEFORE THE
+DAWN
+
+
+The next morning I asked Mrs. Mooney what time it was when we left the
+laundry the evening before, and she said half-past eight. Then I
+recounted the strange experience of the trance, which did not arouse the
+interest I had expected.
+
+"That's nothing. That's the way we all get sometimes," she declared. "If
+we didn't get into them trance-spells there'd be none of us workin' here
+at all, at all."
+
+"Yes, indeed," said a prayerful voice. "Praise God, it's one of his
+blessid pervisions to help us bear our crosses."
+
+"I don't think the Lord's got much to do with our breaking backs or
+feet, do you?" asked the one-eyed girl, as we turned to unload a truck.
+"Now I'm not an unbeliever, and I believe in God and Jesus Christ, all
+right; but I sometimes think they don't do all these things that the
+Methodists and Salvation Army says they do. Somehow, I don't believe God
+knows anything about my eye or that one-armed girl's getting hurt in the
+roller. I used to believe everything I heard the evangelist say, but I
+don't think no more that religion is what it's cracked up to be." A few
+moments later she asked if I was a Protestant, too, and receiving an
+affirmative, proceeded to express herself on the superior merits of that
+form of faith as compared with the Catholic, against which she had all
+the narrow-minded ignorance and superstition which, strange to say, only
+too often characterize the better element of the class to which she
+belonged. This girl's unreasonable prejudice against something of which
+she knew not the first thing presented a paradox universal in her world.
+The Catholic Church as an institution was her enemy, and the enemy of
+all Protestants. "If they could kill you, and not be found out by the
+law, they'd do it just as quick as wink, because the priest would bail
+them out of hell for a dollar and a quarter." And yet, when it came to
+the concrete and personal, she had to admit that all the Catholics she
+had ever known were "just about as good as Protestants."
+
+This religious discussion was carried on in a low voice, with many
+side-glances toward the Catholic side of the table, as if danger
+threatened were they to hear a word of it. I knew, however, that there
+was nothing to fear from that quarter. There was only one religious
+conscience there, and that belonged to the one-eyed girl herself. From
+innumerable other instances I had met with before I had come to this
+generalization: that bigotry and bitter prejudices in matters of faith,
+deplorable as they at first seem to be, mark a distinct step in the
+social evolution and moral development of the ignorant and degraded.
+Nobody else at that table was far enough along to worry herself with
+principles of faith.
+
+"I think the Salvation Army's a kind of good religion," she continued;
+"only they--" but I heard no more; we were interrupted by a flurry of
+interest in the front, which spread quickly to our region, as a portly
+man in an automobile coat and Panama hat made his way by the
+mangle-machines and the tables. The foreman, diffident and uncertain,
+was walking by his side; and from the peremptory and numerous
+instructions he was receiving, it became patent that his companion was
+the "boss." Everybody looked hastily, stealthily, at the Queen, who hid
+her pleasure under a very transparent veil of dissembling, as she helped
+us unload a truck. Never before had I heard the queen laugh so merrily,
+and never before had I realized what a superb, handsome animal she was.
+There was a certain rhythmic movement as she raised and lowered her body
+over the truck. The excitement of the moment added a deeper color to her
+always splendid rose-and-white complexion, upon which the steam-laden
+atmosphere distilled perpetually that soft dewiness characteristic of
+the perfect complexion of young children or of goddesses. And like a
+goddess the queen appeared that moment,--an untidy, earth-chained
+goddess, mirthful, voluptuous.
+
+"She thinks she's mighty fine, don't she?" whispered my one-eyed friend.
+
+The boss halted at the truck, and the queen looked up with ill-feigned
+surprise, as if she hadn't known for five minutes that he was in the
+room. He seemed the personification of prosperous, ignorant vulgarity,
+and his manner, as he swept his eye carelessly over his queen's
+subjects, was one of good-natured insolence. He didn't tarry long, and
+if guilty of the gentle dalliance of which he was accused, it was plain
+to be seen that he did not allow it to interfere with the discipline of
+the "Pearl."
+
+At lunch-time the one-eyed girl and I went off to the same corner as
+before, and no sooner had we begun to divide our pickles and sandwiches
+than in sauntered the foreman, munching alternately from a cylinder of
+bologna sausage in one hand and a chunk of dry bread in the other.
+
+"Well, how goes it?" he asked pleasantly, dropping his long, lank frame
+upon a bundle of hotel table-linen. "Did you try my advice about
+standin' slack-like?"
+
+We replied to his question while the one-eyed girl carved a dill pickle
+and a sweet pickle each into three portions.
+
+He related how he had come to the "Pearl" six years ago, and had worked
+himself up to his present job, which was not to be sneezed at, he said,
+considering that eighteen dollars a week wasn't to be picked up every
+day--and steady work, too, no layoffs and no shut-downs. He emphasized
+the fact, evidently very important in his mind, that he wasn't married,
+that he had not met any girl yet that would have him, which my companion
+insisted couldn't possibly be true, or if it was, then none of the girls
+he had ever asked had any taste at all. He lived at home with his
+mother, whom he didn't allow to "work out" since he'd been big enough to
+earn a living for her. There was a sister, too, at home, who had a job
+in a near-by manufactory; but she was engaged, and going to be married
+in her "intended's" vacation. Then, the foreman thought, he'd have to
+get a wife himself, if he could find anybody to have him. And she
+wouldn't have to work, either--not on your tintype! She would live at
+home with his mother, and darn his socks and sew on his buttons, and
+she'd have no washing or ironing to do, as he got his all done for
+nothing in the "Pearl." That perquisite went along with the eighteen
+dollars a week. Oh, she'd have things as nice as any hard-working young
+fellow could give her.
+
+"Would she have to be purty?" asked the one-eyed girl, who seemed
+unusually interested in this hypothetical wife, and who took such a
+lively interest in the foreman and his plans that I felt my heart sink
+in pity for the poor maimed creature. Was she hanging breathless on the
+foreman's reply to this question? If so, there was a certain comfort in
+the gallant answer.
+
+"No, I should say not," he replied, as I thought with gentle
+consideration of her to whom he was speaking; "I don't think I could
+ever trust a wife who was a ten-thousand-dollar beaut'. She'd want to
+gad too much. I don't think looks count for much; and I'd think she was
+pretty, anyway, if I was terrible stuck on her. Them things don't make
+much difference only in story-papers. But there's one thing she would
+have to be, and that is handy at doing things. I wouldn't marry a lazy
+girl, and I wouldn't marry a girl that wasn't a working girl."
+
+The engines began to give out a warning rumble, and the foreman
+scrambled somewhat reluctantly to his feet, and stretching out his long
+arms, started off.
+
+"Say, that feller's clean, dead gone on you," remarked my companion,
+closing her hand over mine in a pressure that was full of congratulation
+and honest delight.
+
+I scouted the idea, but nevertheless I became suddenly conscious of a
+complete change in his manner from the easy familiarity of the morning
+before. Instead of the generic name of "Sally," or the Christian name
+which on better acquaintance he applied to the other girls, he had
+politely prefixed a "Miss" to my surname. There had come, too, a
+peculiar feeling of trust and confidence in him--a welcome sensation in
+this horrible, degraded place; and it was with gratefulness that I
+watched him disappear in the steamy vista, throwing off his suspenders
+preparatory to plunging into the turmoil of the afternoon's work now
+under way.
+
+"Sure thing he is, I'd bet my life on it," she insisted, as we, too,
+hurried back to the table and took up our towels and napkins once more.
+"There's no mistakin' them signs, and you'd be a little fool if you
+wasn't to help him along. Men's all sort of bashful, some more 'n
+others, and it's a good thing to help along. I like the looks of that
+fellow--he'd be awful silly and soft with his wife."
+
+There was gentle solicitude in the voice, and looking up, I was almost
+startled with the radiance of the girl's face--the face of a good woman
+who loves, and who takes a generous interest in the love affairs of
+another. As we leaned over the truck and began to haul out its wet
+freight, she whispered to me:
+
+"I know all about it because I've been there myself. I've got a
+gentleman-friend, too, and he's awful nice to me. He's been going with
+me five years, and he didn't shake me when I lost my eye. Lots of
+fellows I know would have backed out. That's what I like about that
+foreman. I think he'd do just the same by a girl he loved as Jim did to
+me. We'd have been married this long time, only Jim's got his hands full
+with a crazy mother, and he says she'll never go to any asylum s' long's
+he's able to keep her; and so Jim's aunt she lives with them and tends
+his mother, and it takes 'most all Jim makes, because his mother's sick
+all the time, too, and has to have the doctor and be humored. But I like
+a man that's good to his mother. Jim isn't overly strong, either, and is
+likely to break down."
+
+Late in the afternoon my partner was overcome by an attack of
+sick-headache, and dropped with nausea and exhaustion. Mrs. Mooney and
+the Queen helped her to her feet.
+
+"It's them pickles and them rotten cold lunches you girls eat," declared
+Mrs. Mooney, who was fond of talking on the nutritious properties of
+food. "Now I says, the Lord only give me one stummick, and when that's
+wore out he'll never give me another, and I can't never buy one with no
+money, and I never put anything in that stummick at noon but a good cold
+beer and a good hot plate of soup, and that's what you ought to do. Only
+cost you five cents for the both of them together, down to Devlin's
+place. We go there every day," jerking her head in the direction of her
+crony, "and you can go along if ye have a mind to."
+
+In accordance with this invitation, we became patrons of Devlin's the
+very next day. Promptly at twelve we hurried out, sleeves still rolled
+up and our damp aprons unremoved. There was no time for making a
+toilet, Mrs. Mooney insisted, as Devlin's was three blocks away, and we
+had only a half-hour. Across Lexington, across Third Avenue, and down
+one block, we came to a corner saloon, and filed in the "ladies'
+entrance." The room was filled with workmen drinking beer and smoking at
+the little round tables, and when they saw us each man jumped up, and
+grabbing his glass, went out into the barroom. Commenting upon this to
+Mrs. Mooney, she explained as we seated ourselves:
+
+"Sure, and what'd ye expect! Sure, and it's a proper hotel ye're in, and
+it's dacent wurrkin'-men that comes here, and they knows a lady when
+they see her, and they ups and goes!"
+
+In response to Mrs. Mooney's vigorous order, "Six beers with the
+trimmin's!" a waiter appeared presently with a steaming tray.
+
+"Now eat that, and drink that, and see if they don't go to the spot,"
+cried the old woman, gaily, and we all fell to, with table manners more
+eager than elegant. Whatever the soup was made of, it seemed to me the
+best soup I had ever eaten in New York, and I instantly determined never
+again to blame a working man or woman for dining in a saloon in
+preference to the more godly and respectable dairy-lunch room. We all
+ate ravenously, and I, who never before could endure the sight or smell
+of beer, found myself draining my "schooner" as eagerly as Mrs. Mooney
+herself.
+
+"My! but that braces me up," she declared, sighing deeply and licking
+the froth from her lips; "it's almost as good as whisky." It was a
+propitious moment to ask questions, and I inquired how long she had
+worked at the "Pearl."
+
+"Eighteen months, off and on. I gets the rheumatism and stay home
+sometimes. I believe in taking care of yer back. I says, I've only got
+one back, and when that's wore out the Lord ain't going to give me
+another. So I stay home; but it's so lonesome I'm always mighty glad to
+get to work ag'in."
+
+
+The long, long days sped by, their torture relieved by such comfort as
+we could find in the gossip of the table, and in daily excursions to
+Devlin's, where I had become a regular patron. The foreman, too, added a
+little variety to the monotony by coming to our table sometimes, and
+shaking clothes for a few moments with us, while he gossiped with the
+one-eyed girl and me, which unusual proceeding filled her romantic soul
+with all sorts of happy anticipation. On Saturday morning, after he had
+come and gone, she whispered ecstatically: "That fellow is stuck on
+you, and I'll bet he'll be askin' you to go to the theayter with
+him--just see if he don't!"
+
+But alas for woman's dreams! The next day we saw the boss coming across
+the floor, this time alone. He sauntered up to our table, began to fling
+jokes at us all in a manner of insolent familiarity, and asked the names
+of the new faces. When he came to me he lingered a moment and uttered
+some joking remarks of insulting flattery, and in a moment he had
+grasped my bare arm and given it a rude pinch, walking hurriedly away.
+In a few moments the foreman came back and motioned me to go with him,
+and I followed to the front of the room, where the boss stood smoking
+and joking with the wrappers. The foreman retired a respectful distance,
+and the boss, after looking me over thoughtfully, informed me that I was
+to be promoted Monday morning to the wrappers' counter.
+
+"And now run away, and be a good girl the rest of the day," he
+concluded, with a wave of the hand, and I rushed back to the table, more
+disgusted with the man and his manner than I was thankful to him for my
+promotion to a job that would pay me five dollars a week.
+
+"Didn't I tell you so!" exclaimed my friend, amid the excited comments
+and questions of the others at the table. "That's some of the foreman's
+doing, and I'm real glad for you--it's nothing more than what I've been
+expectin', though."
+
+This opinion was not shared, however, by the rest of my companions, who
+repeated divers terrible tales of moral ruin and betrayal, more or less
+apocryphal, wherein the boss was inevitably the villain. I now found
+myself suddenly the cynosure of all eyes, the target of a thousand
+whispered comments, as I moved about the workroom. The physical agony of
+aching back and blistered feet was too great, though, for me to feel any
+mental distress over the fact--for the moment at least. In the awful
+frenzy of the Saturday-afternoon rush, greater than that of any other
+day of the week, I did not care much what they thought or said about the
+boss and me.
+
+I was shaking my towels and napkins, and trying to look as indifferent
+as I believed I felt, when the foreman beckoned me again, and stepping
+aside, thrust a piece of yellow wrapping-paper into my hand.
+
+"Read it when nobody's looking," he said in a low voice; "and don't
+think wrong of me for meddling in what's not my business"; and he was
+off again.
+
+A few minutes later I read:
+
+
+     "You'd better give up this job. It's no place for a girl that wants
+     to do right. Come back Monday and get your money; and I wouldn't
+     stay to-night after six o'clock, if I was you, but go home and
+     rest. If you can't get a job as good as this inside of a day or
+     two, I think my sister can get one for you in her place; but you
+     won't stay here if you take my advice.
+
+                             "Yours truly,
+
+                                                  "J. P.
+
+     "P.S. Please don't show this, or I'd lose my job; and be sure to
+     come Monday evening for your money."
+
+
+I made at once for the cloak-room. When I emerged, a moment later, it
+was to find the narrow passage obstructed by one of the big soiled-linen
+trucks, over which "J. P." bent industriously, as if he hadn't another
+thought in the world beyond the sorting of table-cloths and napkins.
+Suddenly he lifted up his lank frame, and seeing one of his workpeople
+making her escape, he called out:
+
+"It's not six o'clock yet!"
+
+"I don't care if it isn't; I am going home," I replied promptly.
+
+"What's the matter?" he asked in a loud voice, and then, as he drew
+near, added in an undertone:
+
+"You read my note?"
+
+"Yes," I replied.
+
+"S'pose you kind of wonder at me doing it?" he went on, moving with me
+toward the staircase.
+
+"No; I guessed right away," I answered.
+
+We had now reached the top of the stairs leading to the street door, and
+were out of ear-shot of the busy workroom. The curious faces and craning
+necks were lost to us through an interposing veil of steam. The foreman
+grasped my extended hand in a limp, hasty clasp as I began to move down
+the steps.
+
+"You guessed part, but not all," he whispered, turning away.
+
+I dragged myself to the end of the block and turned into Lexington
+Avenue just as the six-o'clock whistles began to blow. So much I
+remember very distinctly, but after that all is an indistinct blur of
+clanging street-cars, of jostling crowds. I do not know whether I had
+lost my senses from the physical agony I was enduring, though still able
+to perform the mechanical process of walking, or whether it was a case
+of somnambulism; but I know that I walked on, all unconscious of where I
+was going, or of my own identity, until I came in collision with some
+one, and heard a feminine voice beg my pardon. Then a little cry, and
+two arms were thrown about me, and I looked up into the smiling face of
+Minnie Plympton--Minnie Plympton as large as life and unspeakably
+stunning in a fresh shirt-waist and sailor-hat. She was smiling at me
+like a princess issuing from her enchantment in a rose-bush; and lest
+she should vanish as suddenly as she had appeared, I clutched wildly at
+her arm, trembling and sobbing at this delicious awakening from the
+horrible nightmare that had been my existence for so many days.
+
+We were standing on the corner of Lexington Avenue and a cross-town
+thoroughfare, and ever after must that spot remain in my mind as the
+actual turning-point of my fortunes--indeed, the very turning-point of
+my whole life. As I look back upon that beautiful June evening, I again
+hear the rumble of the elevated trains in the street beyond, and again I
+hear the clang of the electric cars as they swirl out of the avenue into
+the street. Probably every man and woman who ever came a stranger to a
+great city has his or her own particular secret and holy place where
+angels came and ministered in the hour of need. I do not doubt it, but
+I do often wonder whether every such person visits his sacred place as
+often as I visit mine. I go to mine very often, especially in
+summer-time, about six o'clock, when, amid the roar and the turmoil and
+the banalities of the real and the actual, I recall the wondrous tale of
+the Burning Bush. For there God appeared to me that evening--the God who
+had hidden his face for so long.
+
+
+"Why, you look as weak as a kitten--you look sick!" Minnie declared.
+"You need a good cup of tea and to be put to bed, and I'm going to be
+the one to do it for you!"
+
+I was half dazed as Minnie Plympton bundled me into a passing electric
+car; and then, with my head leaning comfortably on Minnie Plympton's
+plump shoulder, and with Minnie Plympton's strong arm about my aching
+body, I was jolted away somewhere into a drowsy happiness.
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+Three years have elapsed since that last day in the "Pearl Laundry" and
+my providential meeting with Minnie Plympton.
+
+The events of those three years may be recounted in almost as few
+sentences, for prosperous working girls, like happy nations, have no
+history. And we have been very prosperous, Minnie Plympton and I. We, I
+say, because from the moment of our unforeseen meeting in the
+hurly-burly of that street corner, the interests of Minnie Plympton's
+life and of mine were to become, for the succeeding year, almost
+inseparable.
+
+I said we have both been very prosperous. But Minnie Plympton has been
+more than that: she has been successful--successful in the only real way
+a woman can, after all, be successful. Minnie is married. She is the
+wife of an enterprising young business man, and the mother of a charming
+baby. She has been married nearly two years, and lives in a pretty
+cottage in a peaceful suburb. It was what the world would call a good
+match, and Minnie declares she is perfectly happy. And no doubt she is,
+else that honest creature would not be so bent upon making matches for
+everybody else.
+
+As for myself, I have been merely prosperous--prosaically and
+uninterestingly, though none the less agreeably, prosperous. I do not
+know whether I am happy or not. I am still a working girl, and by all
+the portents of the dream-book I am foredoomed eternally to remain a
+wage-earner in spite of all Mrs. Minnie's good offices. For I was born
+on a Saturday; and "Saturday's child must work for its living."
+
+Now, I do not care to be accused of a superstitious faith in
+dream-books, but I do want to say that I have found all sorts of
+inspiration in a philosophical acceptance of that oracle attaching to my
+unfortunate birthday. If Saturday's child must work for her living, why
+not make the best of it? Why not make the most advantageous terms
+possible with Fate? why not work with, and not against, that inexorable
+Forelady, in cooperation with her plans and along the lines of her least
+resistance?
+
+This I have tried to do. How I have done it, and what the results have
+been, I shall now try to sketch with not more attention to tedious
+details than I feel justified in assuming may be of some help and
+encouragement to other strugglers.
+
+I became a stenographer and typewriter, earning twenty dollars a week. I
+worked hard for my money, and the day was still a long day. I went to
+work at nine o'clock in the morning, and while I was supposed to get off
+at five, and sometimes did, I was often obliged to work till six or
+seven.
+
+And this I called prosperity? Yes; for me this was prosperity, when I
+remembered the circumstances of my beginnings.
+
+When I met Minnie Plympton on the street corner, that hot summer night,
+I was "dead broke," not only in purse, but in body and spirit as well.
+She took me home with her to the two small rooms where she was doing
+light housekeeping, and where we continued to live together until her
+marriage a year later broke up our happy domestic partnership. A few
+weeks after Minnie took me home with her I got a position in the notion
+department of one of the large stores. I received only four dollars a
+week; but, as our rent was small and our living expenses the very
+minimum, I was able to meet my half of the joint expenditure. I worked
+four months at selling pins and needles and thread and whalebone and a
+thousand and one other things to be found in a well-stocked notion
+department; and then, by a stroke of good luck and Minnie Plympton's
+assistance, I got a place as demonstrator of a new brand of tea and
+coffee in the grocery department of the same "emporium." My new work was
+not only much lighter and pleasanter, but it paid me the munificent
+salary of eight dollars a week.
+
+But I did not want to be a demonstrator of tea and coffee all my life. I
+had often thought I would like to learn shorthand and typewriting. The
+demonstrator of breakfast foods at the next counter to mine was taking a
+night course in bookkeeping; which gave me the idea of taking a similar
+course in stenography. And then the Long Day began in earnest. I went to
+night-school five nights out of every week for exactly sixty weeks,
+running consecutively save for a fortnight's interim at the Christmas
+holidays, when we worked nights at the store. On Saturday night, which
+was the off night, I did my washing and ironing, and on Sunday night I
+made, mended, and darned my clothes--that is, when there was any making,
+mending, or darning to be done. As my wardrobe was necessarily slender,
+I had much time to spare. This spare time on Sunday nights I spent in
+study and reading. I studied English composition and punctuation, both
+of which I would need later on when I should become a stenographer. I
+also brushed up on my spelling and grammar, in which, I had been
+informed--and correctly--the average stenographer is sadly remiss.
+
+As for reading, which was the only recreation my life knew, it was of a
+most desultory, though always mercenary sort. I read every book I could
+get out of the circulating library which, from its title or general
+character as summarized in the newspaper reviews, I thought might help
+me to solve the problem of earning a good livelihood. The title of one
+book particularly attracted me--a book which was so much in demand that
+I had to wait a whole six months before I succeeded in getting it
+through the slow and devious process peculiar to circulating libraries.
+That book was "Up from Slavery," and it brought home to me as nothing
+else could have done what was the real trouble with myself and all the
+rest of the struggling, ill-paid, wretched working women with whom I had
+come in contact during my apprenticeship. What that trouble was I shall
+revert to later.
+
+When I had thoroughly learned the principles of my trade and had
+attained a speed of some hundred and odd words a minute, the hardest
+task was yet before me. This task was not in finding a position, but in
+filling that position satisfactorily. My first position at ten dollars a
+week I held only one day. I failed to read my notes. This was more
+because of fright and of self-consciousness, however, than of
+inefficiency. My next paid me only six dollars a week, but it was an
+excellent training-school, and in it I learned self-confidence, perfect
+accuracy, and rapidity. Although this position paid me two dollars less
+than what I had been earning brewing tea and coffee and handing it over
+the counter, and notwithstanding the fact that I knew of places where I
+could go and earn ten dollars a week, I chose to remain where I was.
+There was method in my madness, however, let me say. I had a considerate
+and conscientious employer, and although I had a great deal of work, and
+although it had to be done most punctiliously, he never allowed me to
+work a moment overtime. He opened his office at nine in the morning, and
+I was not expected before quarter after; he closed at four sharp. This
+gave me an opportunity for further improving myself with a view to
+eventually taking not a ten-dollar, but a twenty-dollar position. I went
+back to night-school and took a three months' "speed course," and at the
+same time continued to add to my general education and stock of
+knowledge by a systematic reading of popular books of science and
+economics. I became tremendously interested in myself as an economic
+factor, and I became tremendously interested in other working girls from
+a similar point of view. Of science and economics I knew nothing when I
+started out to earn my living.
+
+One day I answered an advertisement calling for the sort of stenographer
+I now believed myself to be. It brought a response signed with the name
+of a large religious publishing house. I got the position, beginning
+with a salary of fifteen dollars a week, which was to be increased to
+twenty dollars provided I could fill the position. That I should succeed
+in doing so, there was evident doubt in my employers' minds, and no
+wonder! For I was the fifth to attempt it.
+
+My work consisted for the most part in taking dictation from the editor
+of the periodical published weekly by the house--letters to
+contributors, editorials, and special articles. Also, when it was found
+that I had some intelligent, practical knowledge of grammar and
+English--and here was where my studies of the preceding year bore
+fruit--I was intrusted with the revision and correction of the least
+important of the manuscripts, thus relieving the busy editors of one of
+their most irksome tasks.
+
+One day I had occasion to mention to the editor some of the strenuous
+experiences I had undergone in my struggle to attain a decent living. He
+was startled--not to say a little shocked--that a young woman of
+apparently decent birth and upbringing should have formed such an
+intimate acquaintance with the dark side of life. Inspired by his
+sympathetic interest, I boldly interviewed the editor of a well-known
+monthly magazine, with the result that I immediately prepared two papers
+on certain of my experiences; and, to my surprise and delight, they were
+accepted.
+
+And, somehow, with the appearance of those two articles--the first
+fruits of authorship--part of the horror and loathing of that unhappy
+period of servitude fell away from me; the sordid suffering, the hurt to
+pride, the ineffaceable scar on heart and soul I felt had not been in
+vain. I can now look back upon the recent, still vivid past without a
+shiver; for there is comfort in the thought that what I have undergone
+is to be held up to others as a possible lesson and warning.
+
+And now a word as to the verity of this narrative. Have I actually been
+through all that I have described? Yes, and more; and in other cities
+beside New York.
+
+Yet for the sake of unity the order of things has been somewhat
+changed; and no record is given of many weeks, and even months, when
+life flowed uneventfully, if not smoothly, on.
+
+"But," says the thoughtful reader, "do your sordid experiences of some
+two or three years ago match conditions of to-day?" and I answer:
+Generally speaking, they do; because lately I reinforced memory by
+thorough investigation.
+
+I went further than that: when it came to me to write this little
+book--that is so absolutely a transcript from real life--I voluntarily
+labored, a week here, a week there, at various trades allied to those
+that previously had been my sole means of livelihood, and all the time
+living consistently the life of the people with whom I was thus
+temporarily associated.
+
+There were, of course, many little points that when I was a worker in
+earnest I had not eyes to see, but which my recent conscious study
+brought out in proper perspective.
+
+Yet it was as a working girl that I learned to know most of the
+characters that people this book, and which give to it any value it may
+possess.
+
+For obvious reasons, I have been obliged to give fictitious names to
+factories and shops in which I worked; and I have, in most cases,
+substituted for the names of the streets where the factories were
+located the names of streets of like character.
+
+The physical conditions, the sordid wretchedness of factory and
+workshop, of boarding-and lodging-house, I have not in any wise
+overstated.
+
+As to moral conditions, I have not been in every instance so
+scrupulously truthful--that is, I have not told all the truth. For it is
+a truth which only too often will not bear even the suggestion of
+telling. Only in two or three instances--for example, in my account of
+Henrietta Manners--have I ventured to hint definitely at anything
+pertaining to the shame and iniquity underlying a discouragingly large
+part of the work-girls' world. In my magazine articles I was obliged to
+leave out all reference to this tabooed topic. The attitude of the
+public, especially the American public, toward this subject is a curious
+mixture of prudery and gallantry. It bridles at anything which impeaches
+the traditional honor and chastity of the working girl. The chivalry of
+American men--and my experience in workshop, store, and factory has
+proved to me how genuine and deep-rooted that chivalry is--combined with
+our inherent spirit of democracy, is responsible for the placing of the
+work-girl, as a class, in a light as false and ridiculous as that in
+which Don Quixote was wont to view the charms of his swineherd lady,
+Dulcinea. In the main, our notions of the woman who toils do more credit
+to our sentiments and to the impulses of our hearts than they do credit
+to our heads or to any serious desires we may cherish for her welfare.
+She has become, and is becoming more and more, the object of such an
+amount of sentimentality on the part of philanthropists, sociological
+investigators, labor agitators, and yellow journals--and a goodly share
+of journalism that prides itself upon not being yellow--that the real
+work-girl has been quite lost sight of. Her name suggests, according to
+their imaginations, a proud, independent, self-reliant, efficient young
+woman--a young woman who works for her living and is glad of it. One
+hardly dares criticize her, unless, indeed, it be to lecture her for an
+ever-increasing independence of her natural male protectors and an
+alleged aversion to babies.
+
+That we should cling so tenaciously to this ideal is to our honor and
+glory. But fine words butter no parsnips; nor do our fine idealizations
+serve to reduce the quota which the working-girl ranks contribute to
+disreputable houses and vicious resorts. The factories, the workshops,
+and to some extent the stores, of the kind that I have worked in at
+least, are recruiting-grounds for the Tenderloin and the "red light"
+districts. The Springers and the "Pearl Laundries" send annually a large
+consignment of delinquents to their various and logical destinations. It
+is rare indeed that one finds a female delinquent who has not been in
+the beginning a working girl. For, sad and terrible though it be, the
+truth is that the majority of "unfortunates," whether of the
+specifically criminal or of the prostitute class, are what they are, not
+because they are inherently vicious, but _because they were failures as
+workers and as wage-earners_. They were failures as such, primarily, for
+no other reason than that they did not like to work. And they did not
+like to work, not because they are lazy--they are anything but lazy, as
+a rule--but _because they did not know how to work_.
+
+Few girls know how to work when they undertake the first job, whether
+that job be making paper boxes, seaming corset-covers, or taking
+shorthand dictation. Nor by the term, "knowing how to work," do I mean,
+necessarily, lack of experience. One may have had no experience whatever
+in any line of work, yet one may know _how_ to work--may understand the
+general principles of intelligent labor. These general principles a girl
+may learn equally well by means of a normal-school training or through
+familiarity with, and participation in, the domestic labor of a
+well-organized household. The working girl in a great city like New York
+does not have the advantage of either form of training. Her education,
+even at the best, is meager, and of housework she knows less than
+nothing. If she is city-born, it is safe to assume that she has never
+been taught how to sweep a room properly, nor how to cook the simplest
+meal wholesomely, nor how to make a garment that she would be willing to
+wear. She usually buys all her cheap finery at a cheap store, and such
+style and taste as she displays is "ready made."
+
+Not having learned to work, either at school or at home, she goes to the
+factory, to the workshop, or to the store, crude, incompetent, and,
+worst of all, with an instinctive antagonism toward her task. _She
+cannot work, and she does not work. She is simply "worked."_ And there
+is all the difference in the world between "working" and "being worked."
+To work is a privilege and a boon to either man or woman, and, properly
+regulated, it ought to be a pleasure. To be worked is degrading. To work
+is dignified and ennobling, for to work means the exercise of the mental
+quite as much as the physical self. But the average working girl puts
+neither heart nor mind into her labor; she is merely a machine, though
+the comparison is a libel upon the functions of first-class machinery.
+
+The harsh truth is that, hard as the working girl is "worked," and
+miserable as her remuneration is, she is usually paid quite as much as
+she is worth.
+
+For her incompetency she is not entirely to blame; rather is it a matter
+of heredity and environment. Being a girl, it is not natural to her to
+work systematically. The working woman is a new product; in this country
+she is hardly three generations old. As yet she is as new to the idea of
+what it really means to work as is the Afro-American citizen. The
+comparison may not be flattering to our vanity, but, after a reading of
+Booker Washington's various expositions of the industrial abilities of
+the negro, I cannot but be convinced that the white working woman is in
+a corresponding process of evolution, so far as her specific functions
+for labor have been developed.
+
+Conditions in the "Pearl," from the view-point of mere physical labor,
+were the most brutal in all my experience; but, from what I can learn,
+the "Pearl" is no worse than many other similar establishments. Young
+women will work in such places only as a last resort, for young women
+cannot work long under conditions so detrimental to bodily health. The
+regular workers are old women--women like Mrs. Mooney and her cronies.
+The steady workers at the "Pearl" were, with the exception of the
+"queen," all old women. Every day saw the arrival of a new force of
+young hands who were bound to "play out" at the end of three or four
+days' apprenticeship, if not sooner. I played out completely: I didn't
+walk a step for a week after I went home with Minnie Plympton that
+Saturday night. Which was all in accord with Mrs. Mooney's prediction
+the first day: "You won't last long, mind ye; you young uns never do. If
+you ain't strong as an ox it gits in your back and off ye go to the
+'orspital; and if you're not able to stand the drivin', and thinks
+you're good-lookin', off you goes to the bad, sooner 'n stay here."
+
+I would like to dwell for a moment upon the character and personality of
+her whom I have more than once referred to as the "queen." The queen had
+worked, I was told, for seven years in the laundry, and she was, as I
+saw and knew her in those days, as fresh as the proverbial daisy. She
+seemed the very embodiment of blithesome happiness. In the chapter
+dealing with the laundry I had occasion to speak of her voluptuous
+beauty. Her long years of hard labor--and she labored harder than any
+one else there--seemed to have wrought no effect upon her handsome,
+nerveless body. Her lovely eyes, her hair, her dazzling complexion and
+perfect features, were all worthy the reputation of a stage beauty. She
+was kind; in her rough, uncouth way, she was kind to everybody--so kind,
+in fact, that she was generally popular, though envied as enjoying the
+boss's favor. And, as may be imagined, her influence, during those seven
+years, upon the underfed, underpaid, ignorant, unskilled green hands who
+streamed into the "Pearl" every morning must have been endless for evil.
+
+On the subject of morality I am constrained to express myself with
+apparent diffidence, lest I be misinterpreted and charged with vilifying
+the class to which I once belonged. And yet behind my diffidence of
+expression I must confess to a very honest and uncompromising belief,
+founded upon my own knowledge and observation, that the average working
+girl is even more poorly equipped for right living and right thinking
+than she is for intelligent industrial effort. One of the worst features
+of my experience was being obliged to hear the obscene stories which
+were exchanged at the work-table quite as a matter of course; and, if
+not a reflection of vicious minds, this is at least indicative of loose
+living and inherent vulgarity. The lewd joke, the abominable tale, is
+the rule, I assert positively, and not the exception, among the lower
+class of working girls with whom I toiled in those early months of my
+apprenticeship. The flower-manufactory in Broadway was the one glorious
+exception. I do not attempt to account for this exception to the general
+rule, unless it be explainable upon the logical theory that the skill
+necessary for the making of artificial flowers is found only in a vastly
+superior class of girls. The flower-girls I met at Rosenberg's were,
+without exception, wholesome-minded and pure-hearted. They knew how to
+cook, as they had ample opportunity of proving at our luncheons and
+dinners during those four busy, happy weeks. I never met factory-girls
+in any other line of employment who knew how to make a cup of tea or
+coffee that was fit to drink. The flower-girls gave every evidence of
+having come from homes which, humble though many of them must have been,
+were nevertheless well-ordered and clean. The girls I met in other
+places seemed never to have lived in homes at all.
+
+In the telling of the obscene story, Jew and Gentile, Catholic and
+Protestant, were equally guilty.
+
+That the responsibility for these conditions of moral as well as
+physical wretchedness is fundamentally attributable to our present
+socio-economic system is a fact that has been stated so often before,
+and by writers who by right of specialized knowledge and scientific
+training are so much better equipped to discuss social economics than I
+may ever hope to be, that I need not repeat the axiom here. Nor would it
+be any more becoming for me to enter into any discussion of the various
+theories upon which the economists and the social reformers base their
+various projects for the reconstruction of the present system.
+Personally I have a strong prejudice in favor of the trades-union. I
+believe that working women should awaken as quickly as possible to the
+advantages to be derived from organization of the industries in which
+they are employed. But I seem to be alone in my cherished desire. The
+women and girls I have worked with in New York do not view the
+trades-union as their more progressive and enlightened sisters of
+Chicago and the West generally choose to regard it. Chicago alone shows
+a roster of nearly forty thousand women and girls who are organized into
+unions of their own, officered by themselves and with their own feminine
+"walking delegates." I recently spent four weeks among these
+trades-unions, numbering thirty-five distinct women's organizations, and
+I found, everywhere I went, the same enthusiasm for, and the same
+superior degree of intelligence regarding, the aim and object of the
+organization idea.
+
+As for the working women of New York, they have so far refused to
+countenance the trades-union. New York has no woman's trades-union. A
+small percentage of women workers belong to labor organizations, it is
+true; but it is merely as auxiliaries to the men's unions, and where
+they work at trades that have been thoroughly organized for the benefit
+of the men workers. They belong to these unions always under protest,
+not of their own volition; because they are obliged to do so in order to
+be permitted to work at their trades in competition with men who are
+organized.
+
+For this reason, owing to the blindness of the workwoman to the benefits
+to be derived from organization,--and because, moreover, it has not yet
+been proved that the trades-union, carried to its logical conclusion, is
+likely to be a panacea for the industrial woes of the sex which does
+favor and support it--it seems to me rather idle to urge its wider
+adoption under the protest of those most vitally concerned--the women
+workers themselves. The idea of organized labor will have to grow among
+the ranks of women workers just as the idea has grown into the
+consciousness of her father and brother.
+
+We have a great and crying need for two things--things which it is
+entirely within the power of a broad-minded philanthropy to supply. The
+most urgent of these needs is a very material and unpoetic one. We need
+a well-regulated system of boarding-and lodging-houses where we can live
+with decency upon the small wages we receive. We do not want any
+so-called "working girls' homes"--God forgive the euphemism!--which,
+while overcharging us for the miserable accommodations, at the same time
+would put us in the attitude of charity dependants. What the working
+girl needs is a cheap hotel or a system of hotels--for she needs a great
+many of them--designed something after the Mills Hotels for working-men.
+She also needs a system of well-regulated lodging-houses, such as are
+scattered all over the city for the benefit of men. My experience of the
+working girls' home in which I lived for many weeks, and from my
+observation and inquiries regarding a number of similar "homes" which I
+have since visited, justifies me in making a few suggestions regarding
+the general plan and conduct of the ideal philanthropic scheme which I
+have in mind.
+
+First and most important, there must be no semblance of charity. Let the
+working girls' hotel and the working girls' lodging-house be not only
+self-supporting, but so built and conducted that they will pay a fair
+rate of interest upon the money invested. Otherwise they would fail of
+any truly philanthropic object.
+
+As to their conduct as institutions there should be no rules, no
+regulations which are not in full operation in the Waldorf-Astoria or
+the Hotel St. Regis. The curse of all such attempts in the past has been
+the insistence upon _coercive morality_. Make them not only
+non-sectarian, but non-religious. There is no more need of conducting a
+working girls' hotel or lodging-house in the name of God or under the
+auspices of religious sentiment than there is necessity for advertising
+the Martha Washington Hotel or any fashionable bachelor-apartment house
+as being under divine guidance.
+
+A clean room and three wholesomely cooked meals a day _can_ be furnished
+to working girls at a price such as would make it possible for them to
+live honestly on the small wage of the factory and store. We do not ask
+for luxuries or dainties. We do not get them in the miserable, dark
+warrens where we are now obliged to sleep, and we do not get them at the
+unappetizing boarding-house tables where countless thousands of us find
+sustenance. I do not know--I suppose nobody does know--how many working
+girls in New York City live in lodging-and boarding-houses. But they are
+legion, and very few of them are contented with that life.
+
+The most important necessity of the model working woman's hotel or
+lodging-house would be, not a luxurious table, not a dainty
+sleeping-room, but a parlor! The number of young girls who go wrong in a
+great city like this for want of the various necessities of a parlor
+must make the angels in heaven weep. The houses where the poorly paid
+girl lives have no accommodations for the entertainment of her male
+friends. If the house is conducted with any respect for the conventions,
+the girl lodger must meet her young man on the "stoop" or on the street
+corner. As the courtship progresses, they must have recourse either to
+the benches of the public parks, provided the weather be favorable, or
+else to the light and warmth of the back room of a saloon. The average
+cheap lodging-house is usually conducted, however, with but scant
+regard for the conventions, and the girl usually is forced to adopt the
+more convenient and, as it would seem to her, really more
+self-respecting habit of receiving her company in her room. And either
+one of these methods of courtship, it is evident, cannot but be in the
+end demoralizing and degrading to thoughtless young people, however
+innocent they may be of any deliberate wrong-doing. In the model
+lodging-house there should be perfect liberty of conduct and action on
+the part of guests--who will not be "inmates" in any sense of the word.
+Such guests should have perfect liberty to go and come when they please
+at any hour of the day or night; be permitted to see any person they
+choose to have come, without question or challenge, so long as the
+conventions of ordinary social life are complied with. Such an
+institution, conducted upon such a plan and managed so that it would
+make fair returns to its promoters, cannot fail to be welcomed; and
+would be of inestimable benefit as an uplifting and regenerative force
+with those for whom it is designed.
+
+The other need is for a greater interest in the workwoman's welfare on
+the part of the church, and an effort by that all-powerful institution
+to bring about some adjustment of her social and economic difficulties.
+I am old-fashioned enough to believe in the supreme efficacy of
+organized religion in relation to womanhood, and all that pertains to
+womanhood. I believe that, in our present state of social development,
+the church can do more for the working girl than any of the proposed
+measures based upon economic science or the purely ethical theory.
+Working women as a class are certainly not ripe for the trades-union, as
+I have already intimated; and the earnest people of the "settlements"
+are able to reach but a small part of the great army of women marching
+hopelessly on, ungeneraled, untrained, and, worst of all, uncaring.
+
+Few are they who, like Tolstoi, can gracefully stoop to conquer; and
+those who shall be ordained to revolutionize conditions will rise from
+the ranks, even as did Booker T. Washington. This, of course, is the
+ultimate object of settlement work: to prepare the leaven for the loaf.
+
+But a live and progressive church--a church imbued with the Christian
+spirit in the broadest and most liberal interpretation of the term--can
+do for us, and do it quickly and at once, more than all the college
+settlements and all the trades-unions that can be organized within the
+next ten years could hope to do. And for this reason: the church has all
+the machinery ready, set up and waiting only for the proper hand to put
+it in motion to this great end. The Christian church has a vast
+responsibility in the solution of all problems of the social order, and
+none of those problems is more grave or urgent than the one affecting
+the economic condition of the wage-earning woman. It is curious that the
+church, in this age, should choose to regard its primary function with
+such evident apathy. The first business of the church in the past was
+the adjustment of social difficulties. The gospel of Jesus Christ was
+preeminently a social gospel, and when the church ceases to be a social
+force it will have outlived its usefulness.
+
+There are those who believe that the church _has_ outlived that primal
+usefulness. I do not believe so. For men, perhaps, it has; but not for
+women--certainly not for working women. We do not as a sex, we do not as
+a class, flatter ourselves that we have got along so far in race
+development that we have no further need of organized religion. In all
+my experience of meeting and talking, often becoming intimately
+acquainted, with girls and women of all sorts, I have never known one,
+however questionable, to whom the church was not, after all, held in
+respect as the one all-powerful human institution.
+
+And yet, unless they were Catholics, mighty few went to church at all,
+and most of them were resentful, often bitter, toward the church and
+hostile toward all kinds of organized religion. They accused the church
+of not doing its duty toward them, and they declared that organized
+religion was a sham and a hypocrisy.
+
+The only activity exerted by the church in the direction indicated
+partakes too strongly of the eleemosynary nature to make it acceptable
+to any save the most degraded--the weak-chinned, flabby-natured horde of
+men and women who rally instinctively to the drum-taps of the
+street-corner Salvationist, or seek warmth and cheer on cold winter
+nights, and if possible more substantial benefits, from the missions and
+"church houses."
+
+I have no quarrel to pick with the Salvation Army, nor with the city
+missions, as institutions. Both have done too much good for that "ninety
+and nine" which the church forgets. But it is a pity that the work of
+the Salvation Army and of the city missions is sometimes relegated to
+the control of such incompetent and unworthy persons as Henrietta
+Manners and "Brother" Mason. Since my brief acquaintance with those
+aspiring reformers, I have investigated and found that both were
+prominent workers and "guides" in the respective religious movements to
+which they claimed allegiance; I also found that there were other
+Henrietta Mannerses and not a few "Brother" Masons interested in the
+same good work. It is the part of charity and justice to assume that
+their superior officers were totally ignorant of their real characters.
+
+But why should these sacred duties be relegated to the Henrietta
+Mannerses and the "Brother" Masons? Are there not enough intelligent,
+conscientious Christian men and women among the churches who would
+consider it not only a duty, but a precious privilege, to carry the
+gospel of Jesus Christ into the dark places? It is not wise to set a
+thief to catch a thief, and it is worse than useless to encourage the
+weak, not to say the depraved, to carry the gospel to their kind.
+
+In the days when I could see no silver lining to the clouds I tried
+going to a Protestant church, but I recognized very shortly the
+alienation between it and me. Personally, I do not like to attend
+Salvation meetings or listen to the mission evangelists. So I ceased any
+pretension of going to church, thus allying myself with that great
+aggregation of non-church-going Protestant working women who have been
+forced into a resentful attitude against that which we should love and
+support. It is encouraging, however, to find that the church itself
+has, at last, begun to heed our growing disaffection and alienation:
+
+
+     "The fact must be admitted that the wage-workers of this country
+     are largely outside the churches. This breach has been steadily
+     widening; conditions are worse now than they were ten years ago.
+     One of the strongest reasons for this is the fact that the churches
+     have not recognized so clearly as they ought the equities of this
+     conflict. It is a grave failure. They ought never to have suffered
+     such an alienation to occur between themselves and the people who
+     constitute the very bone and sinew of our civilization," says a
+     prominent preacher and reformer.
+
+     "How can the Christian church clear herself of the charge that the
+     very people who heard her Lord gladly turn in multitudes from her
+     threshold? There is need of sober thought and deep humiliation,
+     that this most grave social problem may find a solution which shall
+     bring honor to the church and peace to society."[1]
+
+
+Obviously the fundamental need of the worker of either sex is
+education. She needs to be educated, this work-girl. She does not need a
+fancy education; but she does need a good education, so that upon her
+entrance into the workshop she will be able to read and write and add up
+a column of figures correctly and with ease. This she seems not to be
+able to do under present conditions. And there are other things, even
+more important than the "three R's," which she should be taught. She
+should be taught how to work--how to work _intelligently_. She should be
+trained young in the fundamental race activities, in the natural human
+instinct for making something with the hands, or of doing something with
+the hands, and of taking an infinite pleasure in making it perfect, in
+doing it well.
+
+I have no technical knowledge of pedagogics; I must admit that. My
+criticism of the public-school system I base entirely upon the results
+as I have seen them in the workshops, the factories, and the store in
+which I worked. During this period I had opportunity for meeting many
+hundreds of girls and for becoming more or less acquainted with them
+all. Now, of all these I have not yet discovered one who had not at some
+time in her earlier childhood or girlhood attended a public school.
+Usually the girl had had at least five years' continuous schooling, but
+often it was much more. But, great or small as the period of her tuition
+had been, I never met one whose knowledge of the simplest rudiments of
+learning was confident and precise. Spelling, geography, grammar,
+arithmetic, were never, with them, positive knowledge, but rather
+matters of chance and guess. Even the brightest girls showed a woeful
+ignorance of the "three R's." In only one thing did I find them
+universally well taught, and that was in handwriting. However badly
+spelled and ungrammatical their written language might be, it was
+invariably neatly and legibly--often beautifully--executed. But if these
+girls, these workmates of mine, learned to write clear and beautiful
+hands, why were they not able also to learn how to spell, why were they
+not able to learn the principles of grammar and the elementary knowledge
+of arithmetic as far at least as long division? That they did not have
+sufficient "apperceiving basis" I cannot believe, for they were
+generally bright and clever.
+
+It is true that the public schools are already teaching manual training,
+and that kindergartens have enormously increased lately. These facts I
+know very well. I also know how much ignorance and senseless prejudice
+the pioneers of these educational reforms have had to overcome in the
+introduction of the newer and better methods. The point I wish to make
+carries no slur upon the ideal which the best modern pedagogy is
+striving for; it is, on the contrary, an appeal for the support and
+furtherance of that ideal on the part of intelligent citizenship
+generally, and of conscientious parenthood particularly. I believe
+firmly in the kindergarten; I believe that the child, whether rich or
+poor, who goes to kindergarten in his tender years has a better chance
+in life, all else being equal, than the child who does not. I do not
+know how long the free kindergarten system has obtained to any degree in
+New York City, but I do know that I have as yet found only one working
+girl who has had the benefit of any such training in childhood. She was
+"Lame Lena" at Springer's box-factory; and in spite of her deformity,
+which made it difficult for her to walk across the floor, she was the
+quickest worker and made more money than any other girl in the shop.
+
+Tersely put, and quoting her own speech, the secret of her success was
+in "knowing how to kill two birds with one stone," and, again, "makin'
+of your cocoanut save your muscle." These formulae were more or less
+vague until further inquiry elicited the interesting fact that "lame
+Lena," had had in childhood the privilege of a kindergarten training in
+a class maintained by some church society when the free kindergarten
+was not so general as it is now.
+
+It is not unreasonable to suppose that had this lame girl's workmates
+enjoyed the privilege of the same elementary training, they might have
+shown an equal facility in the humble task of pasting and labeling and
+tissuing paper boxes. "Lame Lena" knew how to work; she knew how to
+husband every modicum of nervous energy in her frail, deformed body; and
+thus she was able to make up--more than make up--for her physical
+inferiority. "Lame Lena" brought to her sordid task a certain degree of
+organizing faculty; she did the various processes rhythmically and
+systematically, always with the idea in view of making one stroke of the
+arm or the hand do, if possible, a double or a triple duty. The other
+girls worked helter-skelter; running hither and thither; taking many
+needless journeys back and forth across the floor; hurrying when they
+were fresh to the task, dawdling when they were weary, but at all times
+working without method and without organization of the task in hand, and
+without that coordination of muscular and mental effort which the
+kindergarten might have taught them, just as it had certainly taught
+"Lame Lena."
+
+The free kindergarten movement is not yet old enough to begin to show
+its effects to any perceptible degree in the factory and workshop.
+Henrietta Manners and Phoebe Arlington and little Angelina were born too
+soon: they did not know the joy of the kindergarten; they did not know
+the delight of sitting in a little red chair in a great circle of other
+little red chairs filled with other little girls, each and all learning
+the rudimentary principles of work under the blissful delusion that they
+were at play. These joys have been reserved for their little sisters,
+who, sooner or later, will step into their vacant places in the
+box-factory. What was denied Angelina it is the blessed privilege of
+Angelina's baby to revel in.
+
+Angelina's baby--the little baby that she kept in the day-nursery when
+we worked together at Springer's--now goes to a free kindergarten. I
+happen to know this because not long ago I met Angelina. She did not
+recognize me--indeed, she had difficulty in recalling vaguely that I had
+worked with her once upon a time; for Angelina's memory, like that of a
+great majority of her hard-worked class, is very poor,--a fact I mention
+because it is very much to the point right here. My solicitous inquiry
+for the baby brought forth a burst of Latin enthusiasm as to the
+cunningness and sweetness of that incipient box-maker, who, Angelina
+informed me, goes to kindergarten in a free hack along with a crowd of
+other babies. But Angelina, bless her soul! is down on the kindergarten.
+She says, with a pout and a contemptuous shrug, "they don't teach you're
+kid nothing but nonsense, just cutting up little pieces of paper and
+singing fool songs and marching to music." Angelina admitted, however,
+that her _bambino_ was supremely happy there,--so happy, in fact, that
+she hadn't the heart to take her away, even though she does know that it
+is all "tomfoolishness" the "kid" is being taught by a mistaken
+philanthropy.
+
+It is fair to suppose that in the factory and workshop of every
+description the kindergarten is bound to work incalculable results.
+Indeed, I sometimes wonder if the kindergarteners themselves can quite
+realize how well they are building--can fully comprehend the very great
+need in the working woman of the identical principles which they are so
+patiently and faithfully inculcating into the tender minds of these
+forlorn babies gathered up in the courts and alleys.
+
+Another important thing looking to the well-being of the working girl of
+the future would be the wide dissemination of a better literature than
+that with which she now regales herself. I have already outlined at
+some length the literary tastes of my workmates at the box-factory. The
+example cited is typical of other factories and other workshops, and
+also of the department-store. A certain downtown section of New York
+City is monopolized by the publishers and binders of "yellow-backs,"
+which are turned out in bales and cart-loads daily. Girls fed upon such
+mental trash are bound to have distorted and false views of everything.
+There is a broad field awaiting some original-minded philanthropist who
+will try to counteract the maudlin yellow-back by putting in its place
+something wholesome and sweet and sane. Only, please, Mr. or Mrs.
+Philanthropist, don't let it be Shakspere, or Ruskin, or Walter Pater.
+Philanthropists have tried before to reform degraded literary tastes
+with heroic treatment, and they have failed every time.
+
+That is sometimes the trouble with the college-settlement folk. They
+forget that Shakspere, and Ruskin, and all the rest of the really true
+and great literary crew, are infinite bores to every-day people. I know
+personally, and love deeply and sincerely, a certain young woman--a
+settlement-worker--who for several years conducted an evening class in
+literature for some girl "pants-makers." She gave them all the classics
+in allopathic doses, she gave them copies of "A Crown of Wild Olive"
+and "The Ethics of the Dust," which they read dutifully, not because
+they liked the books, which were meaningless to their tired heads, but
+because they loved Miss ---- and enjoyed the evenings spent with her at
+the settlement. But Miss ---- did not succeed in supplanting their old
+favorites, which undoubtedly she could have done had she given them all
+the light, clean present-day romance they could possibly read. It is a
+curious fact that these girls will not read stories laid in the past,
+however full of excitement they may be. They like romance of the present
+day, stories which have to do with scenes and circumstances not too far
+removed from the real and the actual. All their trashy favorites have to
+do with the present, with heroes and heroines who live in New York City
+or Boston or Philadelphia; who go on excursions to Coney Island, to Long
+Branch, or to Delaware Water Gap; and who, when they die, are buried in
+Greenwood over in Brooklyn, or in Woodlawn up in Westchester County. In
+other words, any story, to absorb their interest, must cater to the very
+primitive feminine liking for identity. This liking, this passion, their
+own special authors have thoroughly comprehended, and keep it constantly
+in mind in the development of their plots.
+
+This taste for better literature could be helped along immeasurably if
+still another original-minded philanthropist were to make it his
+business that no tenement baby should be without its "Mother Goose" and,
+a little later, its "Little Women," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "Robinson
+Crusoe," and all the other precious childhood favorites. As it is, the
+majority know nothing about them.
+
+
+But, after all, the greatest factor in the ultimate development of the
+working girl as a wage-earning unit--the most potent force for the
+adjustment of all the difficulties besetting her at every turn, and for
+the righting of all her wrongs, social, economic, or moral--will be the
+attitude which she herself assumes toward the dispassionate
+consideration of those difficulties to be adjusted, and of those wrongs
+to be righted.
+
+At the present time there is nobody so little concerned about herself
+and her condition as the working woman herself. Taking everything into
+consideration, and in spite of conditions which, to the observer viewing
+them at a distance great enough to get a perspective, seem
+irreconcilably harsh and bitter--in the face of all this, one must
+characterize the working woman as a contented, if not a happy woman.
+That is the great trouble that will have to be faced in any effort to
+alleviate her condition. She is too contented, too happy, too patient.
+But not wholesomely so. Hers is a contentment, a happiness, a patience
+founded, not in normal good health and the joy of living and working,
+but in apathy. Her lot is hard, but she has grown used to it; for, being
+a woman, she is patient and long-suffering. She does not entirely
+realize the tragedy of it all, and what it means to herself, or to her
+children perhaps yet to be born.
+
+In the happy future, the working girl will no longer be content to be
+merely "worked." Then she will have learned to work. She will have
+learned to work intelligently, and, working thus, she will begin to
+think--to think about herself and all those things which most vitally
+concern her as a woman and as a wage-earner. And then, you may depend
+upon it, she will settle the question to please herself, and she will
+settle it in the right way.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] "The Church and Social Problems," by Rev. Washington Gladden, D.D.
+("International Quarterly.")
+
+
+
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