f has more than one painful
aspect. On account of it, not only the poor girls who fall suffer, but
also the girls who have the constant sense of being "on guard," and find
it wise, for fear of the worst suspicion, to forego all sorts of normal
delights and gayeties and youthful pleasures. Many girls said, "I keep
myself to myself"; "I don't make friends in the stores very fast, because
you can't be sure what any one is like." This fear of friendship among
contemporaries sharing the same fortune, fear, indeed, of the whole
world, seemed the most cruel comment possible on the atmosphere of the
girls' lives in their occupation.

Another kind of meanness in human relations was abundantly witnessed by
Miss Johnson, the League's inquirer, who worked in one of the stores
during the week of Christmas good-will.

The "rush" had begun when Miss Johnson was transferred in this Christmas
week from the neckwear to the muffler department on the first floor of
one of the cheaper stores. All the girls stood all day long--from eight
to twelve and from one to eight at night on the first days; from one at
noon to ten and eleven at night, as the season progressed; and, on the
last dreadful nights, from noon to the following midnight. The girls had
35 cents supper money. Except for that, all this extra labor was unpaid
for.

The work was incessant. The girls were nervous, hateful, spiteful with
one another. The manager, a beautiful and extremely rough girl of
nineteen, swore constantly at all of them. The customers were grabbing,
insistent, unreasonable from morning to evening, from evening to
midnight. Behind the counter, with the advance of the day, the place
became an inferno of nervous exhaustion and exasperation. In the two
weeks of Miss Johnson's service one customer once thanked her; and one
tipped her 5 cents for the rapid return of a parcel. Both these acts of
consideration took place in the morning. Miss Johnson said that this was
fortunate for her, as, at one word of ordinary consideration toward the
end of her long day's work, she thought she must have burst into tears.

There was a little bundler in the department, Catriona Malatesta, a
white, hungry-looking little North Italian of fourteen with a thin chin
and a dark-shadowed, worried face. She had an adored sick sister of four,
besides six other younger brothers and sisters, and a worshipped mother,
to whom she gave every cent of her wages of three dollars and a half a
we