e likeliest dress factory first. I was hopeful, but
not enough so to take my lunch and apron.

At the first dress factory address before eight o'clock there were
about nine girls ahead of me. We waited downstairs by the elevator, as
the boss had not yet arrived. The "ad" I was answering read:
"WANTED--Bright girls to make themselves useful around dress factory."

Some of us looked brighter than others of us.

Upstairs in the hall we assembled to wait upon the pleasure of the
boss. The woodwork was white, the floor pale blue--it was all very
impressive.

Finally, second try, the boss glued his eye on me.

"Come in here." A white door closed behind us, and we stood in a
little room which looked as if a small boy of twelve had knocked it
together out of old scraps and odds and ends, unpainted.

"What experience you have had?"

He was a nice-looking, fairly young Jew, who spoke with a considerable
German accent.

"None in a dress factory, but ..." and I regaled him with the vast
amount of experience in other lines that was mine, adding that I had
done a good deal of "private dressmaking" off and on, and also
assuring him, almost tremblingly, I did so want to land a job--that I
was the most willing of workers.

"What you expect to get?"

"What will you pay me?"

"No, I'm asking you. What do you expect to get?"

"Fourteen dollars."

"All right, go on in."

If the room where the boss had received me could have been the work of
a twelve-year-old, the rest of the factory must have been designed and
executed by a boy of eight, or a lame, halt, and blind carpenter just
tottering to his grave. There was not a straight shelf. There was not
a straight partition. Boards of various woods and sizes had been used
and nothing had ever been painted. Such doors as existed had odd ways
of opening and closing. The whole place looked as if it had cost about
seven dollars and twenty-nine cents to throw together. But, ah! the
white and pale blue of the show rooms!

* * * * *

The dress factory job was like another world compared with candy,
brass, and the laundry. In each of those places I had worked on one
floor of a big plant, doing one subdivided piece of labor among
equally low-paid workers busy at the same sort of job as myself. Of
what went on in the processes before and after the work we did, I knew
and saw nothing. We packed finished chocolates; we punched slots in
already-made lamp co