I didn't tell Mis' Bingy that night that I'd lost my job. I didn't tell her till next morning when she woke up, scared that I was late. We went out in the park with the baby.
"We'll be all right, Mis' Bingy," I says, "don't you worry."
I was sitting on the grass. And when I spoke so, I happened to see my foot sticking from under my skirt. The whole half of my shoe sole had come off, and was gone, and the nails was all showing. Ten days' rent it would take to buy me another pair.
Just now I tore out thirty pages of this book. And just now I read them over. They made me sick to read them, not because of what was there, but because of what wasn't there. It was the same thing over and over again all that time. Hat factory, ribbon factory, braid factory, silk factory, and ten weeks rolling stogies. Some places the girls cared, and was trying to make others care to get things better. In others it was get what you could, look your best, and marry the first man that asked you.
Every place I went, I begun asking about the things that Rose had taught me about—fines, and dockings, and fire safety, and the rest. Then I talked to the girls. That was why I didn't "last."
"You'll get used to things one of these days," says a forelady to me.
"That's what I'm afraid of," I told her.
But the worst was, there wasn't any fun. There wasn't anything to go to, and, anyhow, I couldn't afford the car-fare back in the evening.
Mis' Bingy had found a place where she could leave the baby a little while every day, and she done some cleaning. We moved out of our first room to one farther up that didn't cost so high. I got so I begun to think ahead, nights.
Then one night when I come in, the lady we rented of says a lady had been there to see me; "A lady," she says, "that come in a automobile and says her words as careful as if she was a-singin' in the church. She's a-comin' back again."