rom the house would be given places alongside of
decent girls, and after other decent girls had been turned off to make
room for them. When you worked in this woman's department the house
downtown was never out of your thoughts all day--there were always
whiffs of it to be caught, like the odor of the Packingtown rendering
plants at night, when the wind shifted suddenly. There would be stories
about it going the rounds; the girls opposite you would be telling them
and winking at you. In such a place Ona would not have stayed a day, but
for starvation; and, as it was, she was never sure that she could
stay the next day. She understood now that the real reason that Miss
Henderson hated her was that she was a decent married girl; and she knew
that the talebearers and the toadies hated her for the same reason, and
were doing their best to make her life miserable.

But there was no place a girl could go in Packingtown, if she was
particular about things of this sort; there was no place in it where
a prostitute could not get along better than a decent girl. Here was a
population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of
starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of
men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers;
under such circumstances immorality was exactly as inevitable, and as
prevalent, as it was under the system of chattel slavery. Things that
were quite unspeakable went on there in the packing houses all the time,
and were taken for granted by everybody; only they did not show, as in
the old slavery times, because there was no difference in color between
master and slave.

One morning Ona stayed home, and Jurgis had the man-doctor, according
to his whim, and she was safely delivered of a fine baby. It was an
enormous big boy, and Ona was such a tiny creature herself, that it
seemed quite incredible. Jurgis would stand and gaze at the stranger by
the hour, unable to believe that it had really happened.

The coming of this boy was a decisive event with Jurgis. It made him
irrevocably a family man; it killed the last lingering impulse that he
might have had to go out in the evenings and sit and talk with the men
in the saloons. There was nothing he cared for now so much as to sit
and look at the baby. This was very curious, for Jurgis had never been
interested in babies before. But then, this was a very unusual sort of a
baby. He had the brightest