ctor was an impropriety, and that the matter really belonged to
them. The cheapest doctor they could find would charge them fifteen
dollars, and perhaps more when the bill came in; and here was Jurgis,
declaring that he would pay it, even if he had to stop eating in the
meantime!

Marija had only about twenty-five dollars left. Day after day she
wandered about the yards begging a job, but this time without hope of
finding it. Marija could do the work of an able-bodied man, when she
was cheerful, but discouragement wore her out easily, and she would come
home at night a pitiable object. She learned her lesson this time, poor
creature; she learned it ten times over. All the family learned it along
with her--that when you have once got a job in Packingtown, you hang on
to it, come what will.

Four weeks Marija hunted, and half of a fifth week. Of course she
stopped paying her dues to the union. She lost all interest in the
union, and cursed herself for a fool that she had ever been dragged
into one. She had about made up her mind that she was a lost soul,
when somebody told her of an opening, and she went and got a place as
a "beef-trimmer." She got this because the boss saw that she had the
muscles of a man, and so he discharged a man and put Marija to do his
work, paying her a little more than half what he had been paying before.

When she first came to Packingtown, Marija would have scorned such work
as this. She was in another canning factory, and her work was to trim
the meat of those diseased cattle that Jurgis had been told about not
long before. She was shut up in one of the rooms where the people seldom
saw the daylight; beneath her were the chilling rooms, where the meat
was frozen, and above her were the cooking rooms; and so she stood on an
ice-cold floor, while her head was often so hot that she could scarcely
breathe. Trimming beef off the bones by the hundred-weight, while
standing up from early morning till late at night, with heavy boots on
and the floor always damp and full of puddles, liable to be thrown out
of work indefinitely because of a slackening in the trade, liable again
to be kept overtime in rush seasons, and be worked till she trembled
in every nerve and lost her grip on her slimy knife, and gave herself
a poisoned wound--that was the new life that unfolded itself before
Marija. But because Marija was a human horse she merely laughed and went
at it; it would enable her to pay her board again