machine fourteen hours a day would be tea like lye to put a back-bone in
you. That's why we have tea always in the pot, and it don't make much
odds what's with it. A slice of bread is about all. Once in a while you
get ragin', tearin' hungry. Seems as if you'd swallow teapot or anything
handy to fill up like, but that ain't often--lucky for us!"

"If you all clubbed together, couldn't one cook for you,--make good soup
and oatmeal and things that are nourishing? You would be stronger then."

"Stronger for what? More hours at the machine? More grinding your own
flesh and bones into flour for them that's over us? Ma'am, it's easy to
see you mean well, an' I won't say but what you know more than some that
comes around what you're talkin' about. Club we might. I'm not denying
it could be done, if there was time; but who of us has the time even if
she'd the will? I was never much hand for cookin'. We'd our tea an'
bread an' a good bit of fried beef or pork, maybe, when my husband was
alive an' at work. He cared naught for fancy things like beans an' such.
It's the tea that keeps you up, an' as long as I can get that I'll not
bother about beans."

In the same house an old Swiss woman, who had fallen from her first
estate as lady's maid through one grade and another of service, was
ending her days on a wage of two dollars per week, earned in a suspender
factory, where she sewed on buckles. In her case marriage with a
drinking husband had eaten up both her savings and her earnings, and age
now prevented her taking up household service, which she ranked as most
comfortable and most profitable. But she had been taught while almost a
child to cook, and though her expenditure for food was a little below a
dollar per week, the savory smell from a saucepan on her tiny stove
showed that she had something more nearly like nourishment than her
neighbors.

"I try sometimes to teach," she said. "I give some of my soup, and they
eat it and say it is good, but they not stop to do so much dat is fuss.
All this in the saucepan is seven cents,--three cents for bones and some
bits the kind butcher trow in, and the rest vegetable and barley. But it
makes me two days. I have lentils, too, yes, and beans, and plenty
things to flavor, and I buy rye bread and coffee to Sunday. Never tea,
oh, no! Tea is so vicket. It make hand shake and head fly all round.
Good soup is best, and more when one can. Vegetable is many and salad,
and when I make more