men it contained, and was about to make a note of this item when
he eagerly stopped me. "Wait, wait, please," he cried generously. "When
you put it down, then put this down, too. It is just the same for the
girls. The most of them are married to a family. They, too, take care of
others."

To this truth, Betty's expense of $3 to $4 for her father from her
average wage of $6, and little Molly's item of nine weeks' board and
lodging for her sister, bear eloquent testimony. On the girls' part they
were mentioned merely as "all in the day's work," and with the tacit
simplicity of that common mortal responsibility which is heroic.

The other fact to be remarked in Betty's account is that she spent 60
cents a week for club dues and the theatre, and only 50 cents for all her
casual sidewalk breakfasts and luncheons from the push carts. Such an
eager hunger for complete change of scene and thought, such a desire for
beauty and romance as these two comparative items show, appear in
themselves a true romance. Nearly all the Russian shirt-waist makers
visit the theatre and attend clubs and night classes, whatever their wage
or their hours of labor. Most of them contribute to the support of a
family.

These shirt-waist makers, all self-supporting, whose income and outlay
are described above, were all--with the exception of Irena Kovalova, who
supported a family of four--living away from home. Natalya lived with her
mother and father.

She did not do her own washing, though she made her own waists and those
of her sister and mother. But her story is given because in other
ways--in casual employment, long hours, unfair and undignified treatment
from her employers, and in the conditions of her peaceable effort to
obtain juster and better terms of living--her experience has seemed
characteristic of the trade fortunes of many of the forty thousand
shirt-waist makers employed in New York for the last two years.

In conditions such as described above, Natalya and other shirt-waist
makers were working last fall, when one day she saw a girl, a
piece-worker, shaking her head and objecting sadly to the low price the
foreman was offering her for making a waist. "If you don't like it,"
said the foreman, with a laugh, "why don't you join your old 'sisters'
out on the street, then?"

Natalya wondered with interest who these "sisters" were. On making
inquiry, she found that the workers in other shirt-waist factories had
struck, for various