Never had a “disperate wan” better reason. A factory girl almost from babyhood, her apprenticeship having begun at seven, she had left the mill at fourteen, a tall girl older than her years in look and experience. New York was her Mecca, and to New York she came, with a week’s wages in her pocket on which to live till work should be found, and neither relative nor friend save a girl who had preceded her by a few months and was now at work in a fringe and gimp factory, earning seven dollars a week and promising the same to the child after a few weeks’ training. But seven years in a cotton-mill, if they had given quickness in one direction, had blunted all power in others. The fingers were unskilful and clumsy and her mind too wandering and inattentive to master details, and the place was quickly lost. She entered her name as candidate for the first vacancy in a Grand Street store, and in the mean time went into a coffee and spice mill and became coffee-picker at three dollars a week. This lasted a month or two, but even here there was dissatisfaction with lack of thoroughness, and she was presently discharged. The vacancy had come, and she went at once into the store, her delicate face and pretty eyes commending her to the manager, who lost no time in telling her what impression she could produce if she were better dressed. Weak, irresponsible, hopelessly careless, and past any power to undo these conditions, there was some instinct in the untaught life that put her instantly on the defensive.
“I’m not good for much,” she said, “but I’m too good for that. There’s nothing you could promise would get you your will and there won’t be.”
Naturally, as the siege declared itself a hopeless one, the manager found it necessary to fill her place by some more competent hand. There was an interval of waiting in which she pawned almost the last article of clothing remaining that could be dispensed with, and then went into a bakery, where the hours were from seven A. M. to ten P. M., sometimes later. She was awkward at making change, but her gentle manners attracted customers, and the baker himself soon cast a favorable eye upon her, and speedily made the same proposition that had driven her from her last employment. The baker’s wife knew the symptoms, and on the same day discharged the girl.
“I don’t say it’s your fault,” she said, “but he’s started about you, and it’s for your own good I tell you to go. The best thing for you is to go back to your mother, or else take a place with some nice woman that’ll keep an eye to you. You’ll always be run after. I know your kind, that no man looks at without wanting to fool with ’em. You take my advice and go into a place.”
The chance came that night. The mistress of a cheap boarding-house in East Broadway, her patrons chiefly young clerks from Grand and Division Street stores, offered her home and eight dollars a month, and Lizzie, who by this time was frightened and discouraged, accepted on the instant. She was well accustomed to long hours, and she had never minded standing as many of the girls did, her apprenticeship in the mill having made it comparatively easy.
But the drudgery undergone here was beyond anything her life had ever known. Her day began at five and it never ended before eleven. She slept on an old mattress on the kitchen floor, and as her strength failed from the incessant labor, lost all power of protest and accepted each new demand as something against which there could be no revolt. There was abundance of coarse food and thus much advantage, but she had no knowledge that taught her how to make work easier, nor had her mistress any thought of training her. She was a dish-washing machine chiefly, and broke and chipped even the rough ware that formed the table furniture, till the exasperated mistress threatened to turn her off if another piece were destroyed. It was a case of hopeless inaptitude; and when in early spring she sickened, and the physician grudgingly called in declared it a case of typhus brought on by the conditions in which she had lived, she was sent at once to the hospital and left to such fate as might come.
A clean bed, rest, and attendance seemed a heaven to the girl when consciousness came back, and she shrank from any thought of going out again to the fight for existence.
“I don’t know what the matter is,” she said to the doctor as she mended, “but somehow I ain’t fit to make a living. I shall have to go back to the mill, but I said I never would do that.”
“You shall go to some training-school and be taught,” said the doctor, who had stood looking at her speculatively yet pitifully.
“Ah, but I couldn’t learn. Somehow things don’t stick to me. I’m not fit to earn a living.”