Myra arose, still warm with the touch of his hand—for his hand was almost fever-warm. All that she knew was that he had suffered and was suffering, and that she must help. She was burning now with an eagerness to learn about the strike, to understand what it was that so depressed and enslaved him, what it was that was slowly killing him. Her old theories met the warm clasp of life and vanished. She forgot her viewpoint and her delicacy. Life was too big for her shallow philosophy. It seized upon her now and absorbed her.
She strode back to the young girl, who she learned later was named Rhona
Hemlitz, and who was but seventeen years old.
She said: "Tell me about the strike! Can't we sit down together and talk? Have you time?"
"I have a little time," said Rhona, eagerly. "We can sit here!"
So they sat side by side and Rhona told her. Rhona's whole family was engaged in sweat-work. They lived in a miserable tenement over in Hester Street, where her mother had been toiling from dawn until midnight with the needle, with her tiny brother helping to sew on buttons, "finishing" daily a dozen pairs of pants, and making—thirty cents.
Myra was amazed.
"Thirty cents—dawn till midnight! Impossible!"
And then her father—who worked all day in a sweatshop.
"And you—what did you do?" asked Myra.
Rhona told her. She had worked in Zandler's shirtwaist factory—bending over a power-machine, whose ten needles made forty-four hundred stitches a minute. So fast they flew that a break in needle or thread ruined a shirtwaist; hence, never did she allow her eyes to wander, never during a day of ten to fourteen hours, while, continuously, the needles danced up and down like flashes of steel or lightning. At times it seemed as if the machine were running away from her and she had to strain her body to keep it back. And so, when she reeled home late at night, her smarting eyes saw sharp showers of needles in the air every time she winked, and her back ached intolerably.