o the poorhouse.

Night refuges, I found, are the last stage in this journey. There, with
every day out of work, women become more unemployable--clothes and
constitutions wear out; minds lose hope in effort and rely on luck. As I
sat with a tableful of charwomen and general housework girls in a refuge in
Dublin, I read two ads from the paper. One offered a job for a general
servant with wages at $50 a year. The other ran: "Wanted: a strong humble
general housework girl to live out; $1.25 a week." I put the choice up to
the table.

"If you haven't anybody of your own to live with," advised a husky-voiced,
mufflered girl next me as she warmed her fingers about her mug of tea and
regarded me from under her cotton velvet hat with some suspicion, "you
should get the job living with the family. It takes five dollars a week to
live by yourself." Then forestalling a protest she added: "You'll get two
early evenings off--at eight o'clock."

"Whatever you get, don't let it go." A bird-faced woman leaned over the
table so that the green black plume of her charity bonnet wagged across the
center of the table. With her little warning eyes still on my face she
settled back impressively. As she extracted a half sheet of newspaper from
under her beaded cape and furtively wrapped up one of the two "hunks" of
bread that each refugee got, she continued: "Once I gave up a place because
they let me have just potatoes and onions for dinner. No, hold on to
whatever you get--whatever." And after we had night prayers that were so
long drawn out that someone moaned: "Do they want to scourge us with
praying?", the old charwoman repeated the hopeless words: "Hold on to
whatever you get--whatever."

In the pale gold light that flooded through the windows of the sixty-bed
dormitory, the women turned down the mussed toweling sheets from the
bolsters across the reddish gray spreads.

"My clothes dried on me after the rain, and I do be coughing till my chest
is sore," said the girl who had sat next me at the table and was next me in
the sleeping room. "There was too many at the dispensary to wait."

Out of a sagging pocket in her creased mackintosh she took a clothes brush.
She slipped her skirt from under her coat and with her blue-cold hand
passed the flat brush back and forth over the muddy hem.

"If I had a bit o' black for my shoes now--with your clothes I could get me
a housemaid's job easy," Her muffler covered the fact that she had no
sh