her head as she looked at her, then poured
a cup of tea and put it silently on the edge of the table where it could
be reached.

"She's right enough," she said, "but there's no use thinking about it. I
try to sometimes, just to see if there's any way out, but there isn't.
I've even said I'd take a place; but I don't know anything about
housework, and who'd take one looking as I do, and not a rag that's fit
to be put on? I cover up in an old waterproof when I go for work. They
wouldn't give it to me if they saw my dress in rags below, and me with
no time to mend it. But we're doing better than some. We've had meat
twice this week, and we've kept warm. It's the coal that eats up your
money,--twelve cents a scuttle, and no place to keep more if ever we got
ahead enough to get more at a time. It's lucky that tea's so staying.
Give me plenty of tea, and the most I want generally besides is bread
and a scrape of butter. It's all figured out. It's long since I've
spent more than seventy-five cents a week for what I must eat. I've no
time to cook even if I had anything, so it's lucky I haven't. I suppose
there'd be plenty to eat if you once made up your mind to take a place."

It was the second machine that stopped now, and the haggard woman
running it faced about suddenly. "Do you know what come to my girl," she
said,--"my girl that I brought up decent and that was a good girl? I
said to myself a trade was no good, for it was more an' more starvation
wages, and I'd put her with folks that would be good to her, even if the
other girls did look down on her for going into service. She was
fifteen, and a still little thing with soft eyes and a pretty, soft way,
if she did come of a drinking father. I put her with a lady that wanted
a waitress and said she'd train her well. She'd three boarders in the
house, and all gentlemen to look at, and one that's in a bank to-day he
did his best to turn her head on the sly, and when he found he couldn't,
one Sunday when she was alone in the house and none to hear or help, he
had his will. The mistress turned her off the hour she heard it, for
Nettie went to her when she come home. 'Such things don't happen unless
the girl is to blame,' she said. 'Never show your shameless face here
again.' Nettie came home to me kind of dazed, and she stayed dazed till
she went to a hospital and a baby was born dead, and she dead herself a
week after. An' it isn't one time alone or my girl alone. It's over a