"Always, I guess. What else could I do?"

"Don't you save any money?"

"Save!" said Marija. "Good Lord, no! I get enough, I suppose, but it all
goes. I get a half share, two dollars and a half for each customer, and
sometimes I make twenty-five or thirty dollars a night, and you'd think
I ought to save something out of that! But then I am charged for my
room and my meals--and such prices as you never heard of; and then for
extras, and drinks--for everything I get, and some I don't. My laundry
bill is nearly twenty dollars each week alone--think of that! Yet what
can I do? I either have to stand it or quit, and it would be the same
anywhere else. It's all I can do to save the fifteen dollars I give
Elzbieta each week, so the children can go to school."

Marija sat brooding in silence for a while; then, seeing that Jurgis was
interested, she went on: "That's the way they keep the girls--they
let them run up debts, so they can't get away. A young girl comes from
abroad, and she doesn't know a word of English, and she gets into a
place like this, and when she wants to go the madame shows her that she
is a couple of hundred dollars in debt, and takes all her clothes away,
and threatens to have her arrested if she doesn't stay and do as she's
told. So she stays, and the longer she stays, the more in debt she gets.
Often, too, they are girls that didn't know what they were coming to,
that had hired out for housework. Did you notice that little French girl
with the yellow hair, that stood next to me in the court?"

Jurgis answered in the affirmative.

"Well, she came to America about a year ago. She was a store clerk, and
she hired herself to a man to be sent here to work in a factory. There
were six of them, all together, and they were brought to a house just
down the street from here, and this girl was put into a room alone, and
they gave her some dope in her food, and when she came to she found that
she had been ruined. She cried, and screamed, and tore her hair, but she
had nothing but a wrapper, and couldn't get away, and they kept her half
insensible with drugs all the time, until she gave up. She never got
outside of that place for ten months, and then they sent her away,
because she didn't suit. I guess they'll put her out of here, too--she's
getting to have crazy fits, from drinking absinthe. Only one of
the girls that came out with her got away, and she jumped out of a
second-story window one night. There was a gr