I
had averaged eighty-nine. My best day I finished sixteen dozen shirts
and netted $1.11. My board and washing cost me three dollars, so that
from the first I had a living insured.

There was one negress in the factory. She worked in a corner quite by
herself and attended to menial jobs, such as sweeping and picking up
scraps. A great many of the girls and boys took correspondence courses
in stenography, drawing, bookkeeping, illustrating, etc., etc. The
purely mechanical work of the mill does not satisfy them. They are
restless and ambitious, exactly the material with which to form schools
of industrial art, the class of hand-workers of whom I have already
spoken.

One of the girls who worked beside us as usual in the morning, left a
note on her machine at noon one day to say that she would never be back.
She was going up to the lake to drown herself, and we needn't look for
her. Some one was sent in search. She was found sitting at the lake's
edge, weeping. She did not speak. We all talked about it in our leisure
moments, but the work was not interrupted. There were various
explanations: she was out of her mind; she was discouraged with her
work; she was nervous. No one suggested that an unfortunate love affair
be the cause of her desperate act. There was not a word breathed against
her reputation. I would have felt impure in proposing what to me seemed
most probable.

The mill owners exert, as far as possible, an influence over the moral
tone of their employees, assuming the right to judge their conduct both
in and out of the factory and to treat them as they see fit. The average
girls are self-respecting. They trifle with love. The attraction they
wish to exert is ever present in their minds and in their conversation.
The sacrifices they make for clothes are the first in importance. They
have superstitions of all kinds: to sneeze on Saturday means the arrival
of a beau on Sunday; a big or little tea leaf means a tall or a short
caller, and so on. There is a book of dreams kept on one table in the
mill, and the girls consult it to find the interpretation of their
nocturnal reveries. They are fanciful, sentimental, cold, passionless.
The accepted honesty of married life makes them slow to discard the
liberty they love, to dismiss the suitors who would attend their wedding
as one would a funeral.

There is, of course, another category of girl, who goes brutally into
passionate pleasures, follows the shows, drinks