"What does it pay?" she asked.
"Ten dollars, to start with. Splendid wages. I started on two fifty. But I forgot—you don't know the business?"
"No—nothing about it," was her innocent, honest answer.
"Ah—well, then—nine dollars—eh?"
Susan hesitated.
"You can make quite a neat little bunch on the outside—you can. We cater only to the best trade, and the buyers who come to us are big easy spenders. But I'm supposed to know nothing about that. You'll find out from the other girls." He chuckled. "Oh, it's a nice soft life except for a few weeks along at this part of the year—and again in winter. Well—ten dollars, then."
Susan accepted. It was more than she had expected to get; it was less than she could hope to live on in New York in anything approaching the manner a person of any refinement or tastes or customs of comfort regards as merely decent. She must descend again to the tenements, must resume the fight against that physical degradation which sooner or later imposes—upon those descending to it—a degradation of mind and heart deeper, more saturating, more putrefying than any that ever originated from within. Not so long as her figure lasted was she the worse off for not knowing a trade. Jeffries was telling the truth; she would be getting splendid wages, not merely for a beginner but for any woman of the working class. Except in rare occasional instances wages and salaries for women were kept down below the standard of decency by woman's peculiar position—by such conditions as that most women took up work as a temporary makeshift or to piece out a family's earnings, and that almost any woman could supplement—and so many did supplement—their earnings at labor with as large or larger earnings in the stealthy shameful way. Where was there a trade that would bring a girl ten dollars a week at the start? Even if she were a semi-professional, a stenographer and typewriter, it would take expertness and long service to lift her up to such wages. Thanks to her figure—to its chancing to please old Jeffries' taste—she was better off than all but a few working women, than all but a few workingmen. She was of the labor aristocracy; and if she had been one of a family of workers she would have been counted an enviable favorite of fortune. Unfortunately, she was alone unfortunately for herself, not at all from the standpoint of the tenement class she was now joining. Among them she would be a person who could afford the luxuries of life as life reveals itself to the tenements.
"Tomorrow morning at seven o'clock," said Jeffries. "You have lost your husband?"
"Yes."
"I saw you'd had great grief. No insurance, I judge? Well—you will find another—maybe a rich one. No—you'll not have to sleep alone long, my dear." And he patted her on the shoulder, gave her a parting fumble of shoulders and arms.