The forelady saw, and instantly understood. "I don't mean that," she said. "You can stay as long as you like—as long as your health lasts. But isn't there somebody somewhere—anybody—you can go to and ask them to help you out of this?"
"No—there's no one," said she.
"That can't be true," insisted the forelady. "Everybody has somebody—or can get somebody—that is, anyone who looks like you. I wouldn't suggest such a thing to a fool. But you could keep your head. There isn't any other way, and you might as well make up your mind to it."
To confide is one of the all but universal longings—perhaps needs—of human nature. Susan's honest, sympathetic eyes, her look and her habit of reticence, were always attracting confidences from such unexpected sources as hard, forbidding Miss Tuohy. Susan was not much surprised when Miss Tuohy went on to say:
"I was spoiled when I was still a kid—by getting to know well a man who was above my class. I had tastes that way, and he appealed to them. After him I couldn't marry the sort of man that wanted me. Then my looks went—like a flash—it often happens that way with us Irish girls. But I can get on. I know how to deal with these people—and you never could learn. You'd treat 'em like ladies and they'd treat you as easy fruit. Yes, I get along all right, and I'm happy—away from here."
Susan's sympathetic glance of inquiry gave the necessary encouragement. "It's a baby," Miss Tuohy explained—and Susan knew it was for the baby's sake that this good heart had hardened itself to the dirty work of forelady. Her eyes shifted as she said, "A child of my sister's—dead in Ireland. How I do love that baby——"
They were interrupted and it so happened that the confidence was never resumed and finished. But Miss Tuohy had made her point with Susan—had set her to thinking less indefinitely. "I must take hold!" Susan kept saying to herself. The phrase was always echoing in her brain. But how?—how? And to that question she could find no answer.
Every morning she bought a one-cent paper whose big circulation was in large part due to its want ads—its daily section of closely printed columns of advertisements of help wanted and situations wanted. Susan read the columns diligently. At first they acted upon her like an intoxicant, filling her not merely with hope but with confident belief that soon she would be in a situation where the pay was good and the work agreeable, or at least not disagreeable. But after a few weeks she ceased from reading.
Why? Because she answered the advertisements, scores of them, more than a hundred, before she saw through the trick and gave up. She found that throughout New York all the attractive or even tolerable places were filled by girls helped by their families or in other ways, girls working at less than living wages because they did not have to rely upon their wages for their support. And those help wanted advertisements were simply appeals for more girls of that sort—for cheaper girls; or they were inserted by employment agencies, masquerading in the newspaper as employers and lying in wait to swindle working girls by getting a fee in exchange for a false promise of good work at high wages; or they were the nets flung out by crafty employers who speeded and starved their slaves, and wished to recruit fresh relays to replace those that had quit in exhaustion or in despair.
"Why do you always read the want ads?" she said to Lany Ricardo, who spent all her spare time at those advertisements in two papers she bought and one she borrowed every day. "Did you ever get anything good, or hear of anybody that did?"