it's the same in all. Now, take
mattress-making. I learned that because I could help my father best that
way. He was an upholsterer in Aberdeen, and came over to better himself,
and he did if he hadn't signed notes for a friend and ruined himself. He
upholstered in the big families for thirty years, and everybody knew
his little place on Hudson Street. People then bought furniture to last,
and had it covered with the best of stuff, and so with curtains and
hangings. Damask was damask, I can tell you, and velvet lambrequins
meant money. No cotton-back stuff. They got shaken and brushed and done
up from moths. People had some respect for good material. Nobody
respects anything now. I saw a rich woman the other day let her boy six
years old empty a box of candy on a pale-blue satin couch, and then sit
down on it and rub his shoes up and down on the edge. I say that when
there's no respect left for anything it's no wonder decent work comes to
an end. I make a mattress and there isn't an inch of it that isn't sewed
to last and that isn't an honest piece of work, but you can go into any
house-furnishing department and buy one that looks just as well for a
third less money. Everything's so cheap that people don't care whether
anything lasts or not, and so there's no decent work done; and people
pretend to have learned trades when really they just botch things
together. I just go round in houses and make over,--places that I've had
for years; and I've been forewoman in a big factory, but somehow a
factory mattress never seems to me as springy and good as the old kind.
Upholsterers make pretty good wages, but it can't be called steady any
more, though it used to be. I've thought many a time of going into
business for myself, but competition's awful, and I'm afraid to try. I
won't cheat, and there's no getting ahead unless you do."

"What are the wages?"

"A picker gets about three dollars a week. She just picks over the hair,
and most any kind of girl seems to do now that everything is steamed or
done by machinery. The highest wages now are nine dollars a week, though
I used to earn fifteen and eighteen sometimes, and the dull season makes
the average about six dollars. I earn nine or ten because I do a good
deal of private work, but a woman that can make forty dollars a month
straight ahead is lucky."

Several women of much the same order of intelligence, two of them
forewomen for years in prosperous establishments, added th