It had stood gathering microbes in the room, visible ones evidently, for a scum had formed on the glass that looked like stagnant oil. She blew the stuff back and drank long. Her accent was so bad and her English so limited I took her to be a foreigner beyond doubt. She proved to be an American. She had worked in factories all her life, since she was eight years old, and her brain was stunted.
"FANCY GUMMING"
Mrs. T earns $8 or $9 a week. Her husband also works in a factory, and between them they have made enough to build a pretty little cottage
AN ALL-AROUND, EXPERIENCED HAND
Mrs. F., who has worked in the factory more than twenty years, once as a forewoman, now earns only $5 or $6 a week.
At dinner time, when I left Marches', I had stood, without sitting down once, for five hours, and according to Bobby's computation I had made the large sum of twenty-five cents, having cleaned a little more than one hundred shoes. To all intents, at least for the moment, my hands were ruined. At Weyman's restaurant I went in with my fellow workwomen and men.
Weyman's restaurant smells very like the steerage
in a vessel. The top floor having burned out a few weeks before, the ceiling remained blackened and filthy. The place was so close and foul-smelling that eating was an ordeal. If I had not been so famished, it would have been impossible for me to swallow a mouthful. I bought soup and beans, and ate, in spite of the inconveniences, ravenously, and paid for my dinner fifteen cents. Most of my neighbours took one course, stew or soup. I rose half-satisfied, dizzy from the fumes and the bad air. I am safe in saying that I never smelled anything like to Weyman's, and I hope never to again. Never again shall I hear food and drink discussed by the gourmet—discuss, indeed, with him over his repast—but there shall rise before me Weyman's restaurant, low-ceiled, foul, crowded to overflowing. I shall see the diners bend edged appetites to the unpalatable food. These Weyman patrons, mark well, are the rich ones, the swells of labour—able to squander fifteen to twenty cents on their stew and tea. There are dozens, you remember, still in the unaired fourth and fifth stories—at "lunching" over their sandwiches. Far more vivid, more poignant even must be to me the vision of "Bobby." I shall see her eat her filthy sandwich with her blackened hands, see her stoop to blow the scum of deadly matter from her typhoid-breeding glass.
In Lynn, unless she boards at home, a girl's living