That it was well she had supplemented her preceding speech, she at once perceived by the change that came over the woman's face.
"Oh!" said the woman in a tone at once uninterested. "Well, have you any reference?"
"No. You see——"
"Never mind why. If we get you a job, some of the girls have plenty, an' we can lend you one of theirs. Go out an' sit down an' we'll see what happens."
Violet returned to the dark front room and took a shrinking seat in a corner among the other applicants: two lines of pasty-faced, ungainly, and not over-cleanly women.
She picked up a tattered paper, dated the preceding day, and tried to read it. She saw that the primary election had been held and that Wesley Dyker had secured one of the nominations for magistrate; but she was tired and disgusted and pursued the print no farther, listening, instead, to the babble of gossip that was going on about her.
Had she ever heard that New York was remarkable for having a model employment-agency law, she would there have learned how lightly that law is enforced and how much the employment-agencies of Manhattan resemble those of every other large city. The foul beds in which these women slept three at a time, and for the use of which the agencies frequently charged a dollar and a half a night; the exorbitant two and three dollars exacted as a fee for every position secured; the encouragement given servants to make frequent changes and increase their fees; and the hard plight of maids dismissed from service, whose only friends, being servants themselves, had no shelter to offer—all these things were the ordinary part and parcel of their talk.
The women chattered of their old employers and bandied household secrets from loose lip to lip. Family skeletons were hauled forth for merrymaking, and testimony enough to crowd a divorce-court was given against not a few respectable citizens.
All complained of ill-housing and loneliness. Bad enough at any time, the advance of the race of flat-dwellers and the decrease of householders had intensified all the evils that domestic servants have to endure. The best servants' rooms in the ordinary houses were, it appeared, unheated; the worst were windowless closets in a kitchen or alcoves in a cellar. None of these workers had been given a room in which they could fittingly receive their friends, and, as many of them were forbidden to have callers in the kitchen, they lived what social life was possible on afternoons or evenings "off," on the streets, in the parks, or aboard those floating bar-rooms that are called excursion-boats. Violet remembered Fritzie; she remembered the heavy percentage of servants that, according to Hermann, ended in slavery—and she began to understand.
At five o'clock there entered the room a pleasant-faced, stout woman, uncommonly homely, who was obviously a prospective employer. She looked about her in embarrassment, and seemed uncertain where to go.