rst week is likely to hold an energy of effort that
could hardly last, and she can often be beguiled by small payments and
large promises to continue weeks and even months, always expecting the
always delayed payment. Firms dealing in such fashion change their
quarters often, unless in league with police captains who have been
given sufficient reasons for obliviousness of their methods, and who
have also been known to silence timid complaints with the threat of a
charge of theft. But there is always a multitude ready to be duped, and
no exposure seems sufficient to prevent this, and women who have once
established a business on this system seem absolutely reckless as to any
possible consequences.

There is at present on Third Avenue a Mrs. F----, who for eleven years
has conducted a successful business built upon continuous fraud. She is
a manufacturer of underwear, and the singular fact is that she has
certain regular employees who have been with her from the beginning, and
who, while apparently unconscious of her methods, are practically
partners in the fraud. She is a woman of good presence and address, and
one to whom girls submit unquestioningly, contending, even in court,
that she never meant to cheat them; and it is still an open question
with those who know her best how far she herself recognizes the fraud in
her system. The old hands deny that it is her custom to cheat, and
though innumerable complaints stand against her, she has usually paid on
compulsion, and insisted that she always meant to. Her machines never
lack operators, and the grade of work turned out is of the best quality.
Her advertisement appears at irregular intervals, is answered by swarms
of applicants, and there are always numbers waiting their turn. On a
side street a few blocks distant is a deep basement, crowded with
machines and presided over by a woman with many of her personal
characteristics. It is the lowest order of slop work that is done here,
but it helps to fill the bargain counters of the poorer stores, and the
workers are an always shifting quantity. It is certain that both places
are practically the property of Mrs. F----, but no man has yet been
cunning enough to determine once for all her responsibility, and no law
yet framed covers any ground that she has chosen as her own. Her
prototypes are to be found in every trade open to women, and their
numbers grow with the growth of the great city and strengthen in like
proportion.