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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.")