ratitude for which
I showed almost immediate improvement along those lines whereon she
labored over me. My grammar, for instance. When I said "it ain't," Ada
would say, "Connie, Connie, _ain't_!" Whereat I gulped and said
"isn't," and Ada smiled approval. Within one week I had picked up
wonderfully. At the end of that week Ada and I were quite chummy. She
asked me one day if I were married. No. Was she? "You don't think I'd
be working like this if I was, do you?" When I asked her what she
would be doing if she didn't have to work, she answered, "Oh, lots of
things." Nor could I pin her to details. She told me she'd get married
to-morrow only her "sweetheart" was a poor man. But she was crazy
about him. Oh, she was! The very next day she flew over to where I was
framing up. "I've had a fight with my sweetheart!"

It was always difficult carrying on a conversation with Ada. She was
being hollered for from every corner of the factory continually, and
in the few seconds we might have had for talk I was hollered for.
Especially is such jumpiness detrimental to sharing affairs of the
heart. I know only fragments of Ada's romance. The fight lasted all of
four days. Then he appeared one evening, and next morning, she
beamingly informed me that "her sweetheart had made up. Oh, but he's
_some_ lover, _I_ tell you!"

Ada was born in Russia, but came very young to this country. She spoke
English without an accent. Never had she earned less than twenty
dollars a week, starting out as a bookkeeper. When crochet beading
first became the rage, about five years ago, she went over to that and
sometimes made fifty dollars and sixty dollars a week. Here as
forelady, she made forty dollars. Twenty dollars of that she gave each
week to her mother for board and lodging. Often she had gone on summer
vacations. For three years she had paid for a colored girl to do the
housework at home. I despaired at first of having Ada so much as take
notice of the fact that I was alive. What was my joy then, at the end
of the first week, to have her come up and say to me: "Do you know
what I want? I want you to come over to Brooklyn and live with me and
my folks."

Oh, it's wretched to just walk off and leave folks like that!

That same Saturday morning the boss said he wanted to see me after
closing time. There seemed numerous others he wanted to see. Then I
discovered, while waiting my turn with these others, that practically
no one there knew her "pr