r your umbrella?"
Hertha had said "yes" eagerly, ashamed not to have offered shelter
herself. Then, looking down at her companion's feet that were rapidly
becoming soaked, she asked, smiling, "You didn't think it would rain
when you left home this morning?"

"No," Sophie answered, without the smile that is as much a part of the
American greeting as a handshake. "I did not to forget. All the money I
have I save for my brother in Lithuania to bring him here to me."

"Yes?"

"Then I must keep money for the summer when we shall have no work."

"No work?" Hertha questioned.

"Did you not know? This trade is very bad, very bad. In the winter we
work like the slaves and in the summer no work. And before the work will
stop we sit in the room and wait and wait to see if we will be needed
for the day. Sometimes we sit for one week, two weeks, and only work a
day; we cannot tell."

"Why don't we work all the year through, but have shorter hours, and not
speed?" Hertha asked.

"The trade is like that," Sophie Switsky answered wisely. "People want
everything the same time, made the same way. Then the fashions change,
and people throw away all that they have and buy again."

"How silly," Hertha thought to herself. The ways of trade seemed to her
lacking not so much in humanity as in ordinary common sense.

Their way lay along the same streets until they came almost to Hertha's
door when they said good-night, Sophie refusing to allow her new
acquaintance to go further. "It is nothing to get wet," she averred, "I
used to it;" and she hurried on, mingling so swiftly with the crowd that
thronged the Bowery that Hertha soon lost sight of her small figure. She
felt attracted to this young Jewish girl, and yet she half feared that
she, too, like Kathleen, had a vision, and she questioned whether she
desired another friend who wished to change the world.

And yet, when she had finished a supper alone and had dropped wearily
into a chair by the lamp, she found she was almost ready for a
world-change herself. She was too tired to care to read, too tired for
coherent thought. In her head buzzed and hummed and roared the machines
of the shop and every now and then her whole body twitched convulsively.
Outside the rain beat steadily upon the pavement. It was a night like
this, she remembered, that she had been carried, a little new-born baby,
and placed on mammy's big bed. Who did such a thing? Not her young
mother who had died so soo