"Doesn't he pay you?"
"Sure. But maybe you haven't heard of him. I'm a dressmaker. I work with fifty other girls in a loft down near the East River, making handmade underwear. We work ten hours a day, six days a week, sewing. If you're clever and fast you can make two pieces in a day. They pay you thirty cents apiece. You can buy them on Fifth Avenue for four or five dollars, but that doesn't do us any good. I made three dollars last week, but I had to pay the rent for my room."
It was Simon Templar's first introduction to the economics of the sweatshop; and hardened as he was to the ways of chiselers and profiteers, the cold facts as she stated them made him feel slightly sick to his stomach. He realized that he had been too long in ignorance of the existence of such people as Mr. Oppenheim.
"Do you mean to say he gets people to work for him on those terms?" he said incredulously. "And how is it possible to live on three dollars a week?"
"Oh, there are always girls who'll do it if they can't get anything else. I used to get forty dollars a week doing the same work on Madison Avenue, but I was sick for a couple of weeks and they used it as an excuse to let me go. I didn't have any job at all for three months, and three dollars a week is better than nothing. You learn how to live on it. After a while you get used to being hungry; but when you have to buy shoes or pay a dentist's bill, and the rent piles up for a couple of weeks, it doesn't do you any good."
"I seem to have heard of your Mr. Oppenheim," said the Saint thoughtfully. "Didn't he just pay a million and a half dollars for a collection of emeralds?"
Her lips flickered cynically.
"That's the guy. I've seen them, too — I've been working on his daughter's trousseau because I've got more experience of better-class work than the other girls, and I've been going to the house to fit it. It's just one of those things that make you feel like turning communist sometimes."
"You've been in the house, have you?" he said even more thoughtfully. "And you've seen these emeralds?" He stopped himself and drew smoke from his cigarette to trickle it thoughtfully back across the counter. When he turned to her again, his dark reckless face held only the same expression of friendly interest that it had held before. "Where are you going to sleep tonight?"
She shrugged.