"If you want to preach sermons you're in the wrong place," he flared up.
"This is no synagogue."
"Nor is it a pigsty," Gussie urged, without raising her eyes from her work
A month or two later he abandoned these sallies of his own accord. The other fellows twitted him on his burst of "righteousness" and made efforts to lure him into a race of ribald punning, but he stood his ground
By and by it leaked out that he was engaged and madly in love with his girl.
I warmed to him.
The young woman who had won his heart was not an employee of our shop.
Indeed, love-affairs between working-men and working-girls who are employed in the same place are not quite so common as one might suppose. The factory is scarcely a proper setting for romance. It is one of the battle-fields in our struggle for existence, where we treat woman as an inferior being, whereas in civilized love-making we prefer to keep up the chivalrous fiction that she is our superior. The girls of our shop, hard-worked, disheveled, and handled with anything but chivalry, aroused my sympathy, but it was not the kind of feeling that stimulates romantic interest. Still, collectively, as an abstract reminder of their sex, they flavored my sordid environment with poetry
CHAPTER III
THE majority of the students at the College of the City of New York was already made up of Jewish boys, mostly from the tenement-houses. One such student often called at the cloak-shop in which I was employed, and in which his father—a tough-looking fellow with a sandy beard, a former teamster—was one of the pressers. A classmate of this boy was supported by an aunt, a spinster who made good wages as a bunch-maker in a cigar-factory.