always a
proportion eager to learn. But here, as in all ordinary methods of
learning, the market is overstocked, and even the best-trained girl may
sometimes fail of employment. Now and then one turns toward household
service, but the mass prefer any cut in wages and any form of privation
to what they regard as almost a final degradation. A multitude of their
views on this point are recorded and will in time find place.

In the mean time a minute examination of the causes that determine their
choice and of the conditions surrounding it as a whole go to prove the
justice of the conviction that penetrates the student of social
problems. Again, the shop-girl as a class demonstrates the fact that not
with her but with the class above her, through accident of birth or
fortune, lies the real responsibility for the follies over which we make
moan. The cheaper daily papers record in fullest detail the doings of
that fashionable world toward which many a weak girl or woman looks
with unspeakable longing; and the weekly "story papers" feed the flame
with unending details of the rich marriage that lifted the poor girl
into the luxury which stands to her empty mind as the sole thing to be
desired in earth or heaven. She knows far better what constitutes the
life of the rich than the rich ever know of the life of the poor. From
her post behind the counter the shop-girl examines every detail of
costume, every air and grace of these women whom she despises, even when
longing most to be one of them. She imitates where she can, and her
cheap shoe has its French heel, her neck its tin dog-collar. Gilt rings
and bracelets and bangles, frizzes and bangs and cheap trimmings of
every order, swallow up her earnings. The imitation is often more
effective than the real, and the girl knows it. She aspires to a
"manicure" set, to an opera-glass, to anything that will simulate the
life daily more passionately desired; and it is small wonder that when
sudden temptation comes and the door opens into that land where luxury
is at least nearer, she falls an easy victim. The class in which she
finally takes rank is seldom recruited from sources that would seem most
fruitful. The sewing-woman, the average factory worker, is devitalized
to such an extent that even ambition dies and the brain barely responds
to even the allurements of the weekly story paper. It is the class but a
grade removed, to whom no training has come from which strength or
simplicity