“I want to work by what’s in me. Only, I don’t know what’s in me. I only feel I’m different.”
She gave me a quick, puzzled look from the corner of her eyes. “What are you doing now?”
“I’m the quickest shirtwaist hand on the floor. But my heart wastes away by such work. I think and think, and my thoughts can’t come out.”
“Why don’t you think out your thoughts in shirtwaists? You could learn to be a designer. Earn more money.”
“I don’t want to look on waists. If my hands are sick from waists, how could my head learn to put beauty into them?”
“But you must earn your living at what you know, and rise slowly from job to job.”
I looked at her office sign: “Vocational Guidance.” “What’s your vocational guidance?” I asked. “How to rise from job to job—how to earn more money?”
The smile went out from her eyes. But she tried to be kind yet. “What do you want?” she asked, with a sigh of lost patience.
“I want America to want me.”
She fell back in her chair, thunderstruck with my boldness. But yet, in a low voice of educated self-control, she tried to reason with me: