tion.

She had been in New York a year. In this time she had worked in an
artificial flower factory, earning from $2 to $2.25 a week; then as a
cutter in a box factory, where she had $3 a week at first, and then $5,
for ten hours' work a day. She left this place because the employer was
very lax about payment, and sometimes cheated her out of small amounts.
She then tried finishing men's coats; but working from seven-thirty to
twelve and from one to six daily brought her only $3 a week and severe
exhaustion.[19]

From her present wage of $4 she spent 60 cents a week for carfare and
$4.25 a month for her share of a tenement hall bedroom. Although she did
not live with them, her mother and father were in New York, and she had
her dinners with them, free of cost. Her luncheon cost her from 7 to 10
cents a day, and her breakfast consisted of 1-1/2 cents' worth of rolls.

All that made Sarina Bashkitseff's starved and drudging days endurable
for her was her clear determination to escape from them by educating
herself. Her fate might be expressed in Whitman's words, "Henceforth I
ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune."

Whatever her circumstances, few persons in the world could ever be in a
position to pity her.

Marta Neumann, another unskilled factory worker, an Austrian girl of
nineteen, was also trying to escape from her present position by
educating herself at night school, but was drained by cruel homesickness.

Marta had spent all her youth, since her childhood, at home,--four years
in New York,--in factory work, without the slightest prospect of
advancement. Her work was of the least skilled kind--cutting off the ends
of threads from men's suspenders, and folding and placing them in boxes.
She earned at first $3 a week, and had been advanced to $5 by a 50-cent
rise at every one of the last four Christmases since she had left her
mother and father. But she knew she would not be advanced beyond this
last price, and feared to undertake heavier work, as, though she had
kept her health, she was not at all strong.

She worked from eight to six, with half an hour at noon. On Saturday the
factory closed at five in winter and at one in summer. Her income for the
year had been $237.50. She had spent $28.50 for carfare; $13 for a suit;
$2 for a hat; and $2 for a pair of shoes she had worn for ten months. Her
board and lodging with a married sister had cost her $2.50 a week, less
in one way than with strangers. Bu