sed her nature to revolt at such confinement. Dirt had never been her
share. Her sister's flat was clean. This place was grimy and low, the
girls were careless and hardened. They must be bad-minded and hearted,
she imagined. Still, a place had been offered her. Surely Chicago
was not so bad if she could find one place in one day. She might find
another and better later.

Her subsequent experiences were not of a reassuring nature, however.
From all the more pleasing or imposing places she was turned away
abruptly with the most chilling formality. In others where she applied
only the experienced were required. She met with painful rebuffs, the
most trying of which had been in a manufacturing cloak house, where she
had gone to the fourth floor to inquire.

"No, no," said the foreman, a rough, heavily built individual, who
looked after a miserably lighted workshop, "we don't want any one. Don't
come here."

With the wane of the afternoon went her hopes, her courage, and her
strength. She had been astonishingly persistent. So earnest an effort
was well deserving of a better reward. On every hand, to her fatigued
senses, the great business portion grew larger, harder, more stolid in
its indifference. It seemed as if it was all closed to her, that the
struggle was too fierce for her to hope to do anything at all. Men and
women hurried by in long, shifting lines. She felt the flow of the
tide of effort and interest--felt her own helplessness without quite
realising the wisp on the tide that she was. She cast about vainly
for some possible place to apply, but found no door which she had
the courage to enter. It would be the same thing all over. The old
humiliation of her plea, rewarded by curt denial. Sick at heart and in
body, she turned to the west, the direction of Minnie's flat, which she
had now fixed in mind, and began that wearisome, baffled retreat which
the seeker for employment at nightfall too often makes. In passing
through Fifth Avenue, south towards Van Buren Street, where she intended
to take a car, she passed the door of a large wholesale shoe house,
through the plate-glass windows of which she could see a middle-aged
gentleman sitting at a small desk. One of those forlorn impulses which
often grow out of a fixed sense of defeat, the last sprouting of a
baffled and uprooted growth of ideas, seized upon her. She walked
deliberately through the door and up to the gentleman, who looked at her
weary face with part