f many machines. My job
is often changed during the week. I do everything as a greenhorn, but I
work hard and pay attention, so that there is no excuse to dismiss me.

"I am only staying here between jobs," the girl next me volunteers at
lunch. "My regular place burnt out. You couldn't get _me_ to work under
_her_. I wouldn't stand it even if they do pay well." She is an
American.

"You're lucky to be so independent," says a German woman whose dull
silence I had hitherto taken for ill nature. "I'm glad enough to get the
money. I was up this morning at five, working. There's myself and my
mother and my little girl, and not a cent but what I make. My husband is
sick. He's in Arizona."

"What were you doing at five?" I asked.

"I have a trade," she answers. "I work on hair goods. It don't bring me
much, but I get in a few hours night and morning and it helps some.
There's so much to pay."

She was young, but youth is no lover of discomfort. Hardships had chased
every vestige of _jeunesse_ from her high, wrinkled brow and tired brown
eyes. Like a mirror held against despair her face reflected no ray of
hope. She was not rebellious, but all she knew of life was written there
in lines whose sadness a smile now and again intensified.

Added to the stale, heavy atmosphere there is now a smell of coffee and
tobacco smoke. The old hands have boiled a noon beverage on the gas; the
tailors smoke an after-dinner pipe. Put up in newspaper by Mrs. Wood, at
my matinal departure, my lunches, after a journey across the city, held
tightly under my arm, become, before eating, a block of food, a
composite meal in which I can distinguish original bits of ham sandwich
and apple pie. The work, however, does not seem hard to me. I sew on
buttons, rip trousers, baste coat sleeves--I do all sorts of odd jobs
from eight until six, without feeling, in spite of the bad air, any
great physical fatigue which ten minutes' brisk walk does not shake off.
But never have the hours dragged so; the moral weariness in the midst of
continual scolding and abuse are unbearable. Each night I come to a firm
decision to leave the following day, but weakly I return, sure of my
dollar and dreading to face again the giant city in search of work.
About four one afternoon, well on in the week, Frances brings me a pair
of military trousers; the stripes of cloth at the side seam are to be
ripped off. I go to work cheerfully cutting the threads and slipping one
piec