ise, the sordidness, the witchlike matron annoy me. I have a sudden
impulse to flee, to seek warmth and food and proper shelter--to snap my
fingers at experience and be grateful I was born among the fortunate.
Something within me calls _Courage_! I take a room at three dollars a
week with board, put my things in it, and while my feet yet ache with
cold I start to find a factory, a pickle factory, which, the matron
tells me, is run by a Christian gentleman.

I have felt timid and even overbold at different moments in my life,
but never so audacious as on entering a factory door marked in gilt
letters: "_Women Employees_."

The Cerberus between me and the fulfilment of my purpose is a
gray-haired timekeeper with kindly eyes. He sits in a glass cage and
about him are a score or more of clocks all ticking soundly and all
surrounded by an extra dial of small numbers running from one to a
thousand. Each number means a workman--each tick of the clock a moment
of his life gone in the service of the pickle company. I rap on the
window of the glass cage. It opens.

"Do you need any girls?" I ask, trying not to show my emotion.

"Ever worked in a factory?"

"No, sir; but I'm very handy."

"What have you done?"

"Housework," I respond with conviction, beginning to believe it myself.

"Well," he says, looking at me, "they need help up in the bottling
department; but I don't know as it would pay you--they don't give more
than sixty or seventy cents a day."

"I am awfully anxious for work," I say. "Couldn't I begin and get
raised, perhaps?"

"Surely--there is always room for those who show the right spirit. You
come in to-morrow morning at a quarter before seven. You can try it,
and you mustn't get discouraged; there's plenty of work for good
workers."

The blood tingles through my cold hands. My heart is lighter. I have not
come in vain. I have a place!

When I get back to the boarding-house it is twilight. The voices I had
heard and been annoyed by have materialized. Before the gas stove there
are nine small individuals dressed in a strange combination of uniform
checked aprons and patent leather boots worn out and discarded by the
babies of the fortunate. The small feet they encase are crossed, and the
freshly washed faces are demure, as the matron with the wig frowns down
into a newspaper from which she now and then hisses a command to order.
Three miniature members are rocking violently in tiny rocking chairs.

"