eons, from 15 to 30 cents a day.

She wore a black sateen waist, which had cost $1. A suit had cost $8; a
hat, $3; and a pair of shoes, $2. Working her hardest and fastest, she
had not received enough money to pay for even these meagre belongings,
and was obliged to have assistance from her brother, her only relative in
New York.

Every line of Minna's little figure looked overworked. This was true,
too, of Sadie, a little underfed, grayish Austrian girl of seventeen, who
had come to New York as the advance guard of her family.

In the last year since her arrival, two and one-half years before, she
had first been employed for seven months in a neckwear factory, where she
earned from $2.50 a week to $6 and $7 on piece-work. In two very busy
weeks she had earned $9 a week.

After the slack season, the factory closed. Hunting desperately for a way
to make money, Sadie found employment as an operative on children's
dresses, running a foot-power machine in a tenement work-room for $2.50 a
week. In the second week her wage was advanced to $3 and continued at
this for the next three or four months.

After this, the demand for neckwear had increased again. She had returned
to the neckwear factory, and was earning $6 a week. Her busiest days were
eleven hours long, and her others nine.

She spent nothing for pleasure. She could send nothing to her family. In
the course of two years and a half she had bought one hat for $3 and a
suit for $12. She went to night school, but was generally so weary that
she could learn really nothing. She did her own washing, and for $3 a
month she rented a sleeping space in the kitchen of a squalid, crowded
East Side tenement. It was the living-room of her poverty-stricken
landlady's family; and she had to wait until they all left it, sometimes
late at night, before she dragged her bed out of an obscure corner and
flung it on the floor for her long-desired sleep. Supper with the
landlady cost her 20 cents a night. Sadie's breakfasts and dinners
depended absolutely upon her income and her other expenses. As in the
weeks when she was earning $3 she had only 90 cents for fourteen meals a
week and her clothing, and in the weeks when she earned $2.50, only 40
cents a week for fourteen meals and her clothing, her depleted health is
easily understood.

Sadie's custom of paying rent and yet dragging a pallet out of the corner
and finding or waiting for a place to throw it in, like a little vagrant,