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 garla