At the Imperial shop most of the girls were Jewish. Annie Black and half a dozen other young Americans sat by themselves at a north window and when luncheon time came rehearsed the very lively happenings of the night before over their indigestible food; but the other girls were Russian Jews and spoke in Yiddish. Hertha was glad to have been seated with the latter group, for from the first she liked them better than her compatriots. Her shyness, coupled with her dislike of the vulgar, kept her from making any acquaintances among the American girls, but she sometimes regretted that the barrier of language separated her from the Jewish. Some of them were, to be sure, foolish and vain, but the majority were serious, and a few appealed to her sense both of decorum and beauty. These girls had broad foreheads and wore their dark hair parted and drawn down over the upper part of their ears. Their deep brown eyes had long curling lashes. They carried serious looking books to and from their work. She often wondered what they were talking about when they got together at luncheon, and she always smiled when she passed them to go out at noon.
One night, early in January, she got into conversation with one of them as they left the factory. It was Sophie Switsky, a small, thin young woman of eighteen whose dark hair and eyes made almost too striking a contrast to her white face. "I go with you?" she had asked, looking up at Hertha as they went out into the rain, "I go under your umbrella?" Hertha had said "yes" eagerly, ashamed not to have offered shelter herself. Then, looking down at her companion's feet that were rapidly becoming soaked, she asked, smiling, "You didn't think it would rain when you left home this morning?"
"No," Sophie answered, without the smile that is as much a part of the American greeting as a handshake. "I did not to forget. All the money I have I save for my brother in Lithuania to bring him here to me."
"Yes?"
"Then I must keep money for the summer when we shall have no work."
"No work?" Hertha questioned.
"Did you not know? This trade is very bad, very bad. In the winter we work like the slaves and in the summer no work. And before the work will stop we sit in the room and wait and wait to see if we will be needed for the day. Sometimes we sit for one week, two weeks, and only work a day; we cannot tell."
"Why don't we work all the year through, but have shorter hours, and not speed?" Hertha asked.
"The trade is like that," Sophie Switsky answered wisely. "People want everything the same time, made the same way. Then the fashions change, and people throw away all that they have and buy again."
"How silly," Hertha thought to herself. The ways of trade seemed to her lacking not so much in humanity as in ordinary common sense.