he spring and the autumn, while the orders were
piling up, work was carried on with feverish intensity. The working day
lasted from eight-thirty until six, with an hour at noon for luncheon.
Many employees, however, stayed until nine o'clock, receiving $1, besides
30 cents supper money, for overtime. But by six o'clock Frances was so
exhausted that she could do no more, and she always went home at that
hour.

In addition to her thirty weeks in the Fifth Avenue order establishment,
Frances had two weeks' work in a wholesale house, where the season began
earlier; so that she had been employed for thirty-two weeks in the year,
and idle for twenty. She was a piece-worker and she had earned from $8 to
$14 a week.

The twenty idle weeks had been filled with continuous futile attempts to
find anything to do. Application at department stores had been
ineffectual, so had answered advertisements. She said she had lost all
scruples about lying, because, the moment it was known that she wanted a
place during the dull season only, she had no chance at all.

Frances lived in one of the pleasantest and most expensive subsidized
homes for working girls, paying for board, and a large, delightful room
shared with two other girls, $4.50 a week. Although she walked sometimes
from work, carfare usually amounted to 50 cents a week. Laundering two
sets of underwear and one white waist a week cost 60 cents. Thus, for a
reasonable degree of cleanliness and comfort, partly provided by
philanthropic persons, she spent $5.60 a week aside from the cost of
clothing.

She dressed plainly, though everything she had was of nice quality. She
said she could spend nothing for pleasure, because of her constant
foreboding of the dull season, and the necessity of always saving for her
apparently inevitable weeks of idleness. She was, at the time she gave
her account, extremely anxious because she did not know how she was to
pay another week's board.

Yet she had excellent training and skill, the advantage of living
comfortably and being well nourished, and the advantage of a considerate
employer, who did as well as she could for her workers, under the
circumstances.

Something, then, must be said about these circumstances--this widespread
precariousness in work, against which no amount of thrift or
industriousness or foresight can adequately provide. Where industry acts
the part of the grasshopper in the fable, it is clearly quite hopeless
for worker