it for clothes and washing. Oh, I worry and worry about
money. But I've paid back my $50. I have a nice silk dress now, and a new
hat. And now I've got them," she added, with a laugh, "I haven't got
anywhere to wear them to. I look forward to Sunday through the week days;
but when Sunday comes, I like Monday best.

"Though I think it doesn't make much difference how you do in the store
about being promoted. A girl next me who doesn't sell half as much as I
do gets $12 where I have $9; and the commission we have on sales in
Christmas week wasn't given to me fairly. The store is kind in many ways,
and lets the girls sit down every minute when customers aren't there, and
has evening classes and club-rooms. But yet the girls are discouraged
about not having promotions fairly and not having commissions straight.
Right is right."[4]

The charmlessness of existence noticeable in most of the working girls'
homes was emphasized by a saleswoman in the china department of a
Broadway department store, Kate McCray, a pretty young Irishwoman of
about twenty-three, who was visited in a hotel she said she didn't like
to mention to people, for fear they would think it was queer. "You see,
it's a boat, a liner that a gentleman that has a large plantation gave
for a hotel for working girls. It seems peculiar to some people for a
girl to be living on the river."

Miss McCray paid $3.50 a week board at the Maverick Deep-Sea Hotel. Her
salary was $8 a week. She had been in the same department for four years,
and considered it wrong that she received no promotion. She could save
nothing, as she did none of her own washing on account of its inroads of
fatigue, and she was obliged to dress well. She was, however, in
excellent health and especially praised the store's policy of advising
the girls to sit down and to rest whenever no customers were present.

It was misty and raining on the occasion of my visit to the Maverick
Deep-Sea Hotel, a liner anchored in the East River; and Miss McCray
conducted me into the cabin to a large party of boys, elderly women, and
children, most of them visitors like myself, and all listening to a
powerful-wristed youth happily playing, "You'll Come Back and Hang
Around," with heavily accented rag-time, on an upright piano.

"About seventy girls board on this boat. That young lady going into the
pantry now is a stenographer--such a bright girl."

Absorbed in the spectacle of a hotel freedom which permitted a