tending an envelope machine, at a wage of $6 a week. She was
about twenty years old; and before her employment at the envelope machine
she had worked, at the age of fourteen, for a year in a carpet mill; then
for two years in a tobacco factory; and then for two years had kept house
for a sister and an aunt living in an East Side tenement.

She still lived with them, sharing a room with her sister, and paying $3
a week for her lodging, with board and part of her washing. She did the
rest of her washing, and made some of her sister's clothes and all of her
own. This skill had enabled her to have for $5.20, the cost of the
material, the pretty spring suit she wore--a coat, skirt, and jumper, of
cloth much too thin to protect her from the chill of the weather, but
stylishly cut and becoming.

In idle times she had done a little sewing for friends, for her income
had been quite inadequate. During the twenty-two weeks she had been in
the factory she had had full work for eleven and one-half weeks, at $6;
half-time for eight and one-half weeks, at $3; and two weeks of slack
work, in each of which she earned only $1.50.

She had no money at all to spend for recreation; and, in her hopelessness
of the future and her natural thirst for pleasure, she sometimes accepted
it from chance men acquaintances met on the street.

Another unskilled worker of twenty, Sarina Bashkitseff, intended to
escape from her monotonous work and low wage by educating herself in a
private evening school.

For this she contrived to save $4 a month out of her income of $4 a week.
Sarina packed powders in a drug factory from eight to six o'clock, with
three-quarters of an hour for lunch. She was a beautiful and brilliant
girl, who used to come to work in the winter dressed in her summer coat,
with a little woollen under-jacket to protect her from the cold, and a
plain cheap felt hat, much mocked at by the American girls. Sarina
scorned the mental scope of these girls; scorned to spend for dress,
money with which she could learn to read "Othello" and "King Lear" in the
original; and scorned to spend in giggling the lunch hour, in which she
might read in Yiddish newspapers the latest tidings of the struggle in
Russia.

In the drug factory, and in her East Side hall bedroom, she lived in a
world of her own--a splendid, generous world of the English tragedies she
studied at night school, and of the thrilling hopes and disappointments
of the Russian revolu