Prepared for disaster, the girls paled as they cast at each other sidelong, frightened glances.
“Hands,” he addressed us, fingering the gold watch-chain that spread across his fat belly, “it’s slack in the other trades and I can get plenty girls begging themselves to work for half what you’re getting—only I ain’t a skinner. I always give my hands a show to earn their bread. From now on, I’ll give you fifty cents a dozen shirts instead of seventy-five, but I’ll give you night-work, so you needn’t lose nothing.” And he was gone.
The stillness of death filled the shop. Each one felt the heart of the other bleed with her own helplessness.
A sudden sound broke the silence. A woman sobbed chokingly. It was Balah Rifkin, a widow with three children.
“Oi weh!” She tore at her scrawny neck. “The blood-sucker—the thief! How will I give them to eat—my babies—my babies—my hungry little lambs!”
“Why do we let him choke us?”
“Twenty-five cents less on a dozen—how will we be able to live?”
“He tears the last skin from our bones!”
“Why didn’t nobody speak up to him?”
“Tell him he couldn’t crush us down to worse than we had in Russia?”