e or four days. This loss had reduced her income by $32. She
had been obliged to pay $9 for medicine. Her income for the year had been
about $262. For board and lodging in a tenement she had paid $3.50 a
week; for carfare 60 cents a week; and she had sent $5 home in the year;
and given $9 for medicine; $36 for the dentist; and $1 a month to the
Jewish Girls' Self-Education Society. She had less than $10 left for
dress for the year. But her lover had helped her with many presents; and
had given her many good times and pleasures, besides those obtainable at
the Jewish Girls' Self-Education Society.

Tina had the advantage of a knowledge of English. This lack of
opportunity to learn the tongue of the country in which she lived was
poignantly regretted by another machine operative, Fanny Leysher, a
white-goods operative of twenty-one who had been in America four years.
She lived in one room of a tenement off the Bowery, where she boarded and
lodged for $4 a week. She worked in a factory within walking distance,
earning $7 a week in the busy season.

Fanny was a pretty, fair girl, with a graceful presence, a wistful smile,
and the charm peculiar to blond Russians with long gray eyes. She looked,
however, painfully frail and white. In the factory she had worked for
four years, first at time work, then at piece-work. She could earn $7 a
week by stitching up and down the fronts and stitching on the belts of
108 corset covers--9 dozen a day. This was the most she could possibly
complete. The unremitting speeding and close attention this amount of
stitching required left her too exhausted at six o'clock to be able to
attend night school, or to learn English. She suffered greatly from
headache and from backache.

Fanny worked in this way for forty-one weeks of the year. For six weeks
she worked three days in the week. For two weeks the factory closed. For
three weeks she had been ill.

She was a girl of quick nervous intelligence, eager for life and with a
nice sense of quality. When she talked of her inability to go to night
school because of her frailness and weariness, tears flooded her eyes.
Her room was very nicely kept, and she had on a shelf a novel of
Sudermann's and a little book of Rosenthal's sweat shop verses.
Everything she wore was put on carefully and with good taste. Her dress
showed the quickest adaptability, and in correctness, and simplicity of
line and color might have belonged to a college freshman "with ev