“Maybe she doesn’t know everything,” said the little girl, fingering a religious medal that shone beneath her brown muffler.  “Maybe some one’s dropped out.  Let’s say a prayer.”

Through the cutting sleet we bent our way to Dublin’s largest factory—­a plant where 1,000 girls are employed at what are the best woman’s wages in Dublin, $4.50 to $10 a week.

“You gotta be pretty brassy to ask for work here,” said the little girl.  “Everybody wants to work here.  But you can’t get anything unless you’re b-brassy, can you?”

We entered a big-windowed, red-bricked factory, and in response to our timid application, a black-clad woman shook her head wearily.  Down a puddly, straw-strewn lane we were blown to one of the factories next in size—­a fifty to 100 hand factory is considered big in Dublin.  The sign on the door was scrawled: 

“No Hands Wanted.”

But in the courage of companionship we mounted the black, narrow-treaded wooden stairs to a box-littered room where white-aproned girls were nailing candy containers together.  While we waited for the manager to come out, we stood with bowed heads so that the sleet could pool off our hats, and through a big crack in the plank floor we could see hard red candies swirling below.  Suddenly we heard a voice and looked up to see the ticking-aproned manager spluttering: 

“Well, can’t you read?”

Up in a loft-like, saw-dusty room where girls were stuffing dolls and daubing red paint on china cheeks, an excited manager declared he was losing his own job.  The new woman’s trade union league wanted him to pay more than one dollar a week to his girls.  He would show the union his books.  Wasn’t it better to have some job than none at all?

Down the wet street, now glinting blindingly in the late sun, we walked into a grubby little tea shop for a sixpenny pot of tea between us.  Out of my pocket I pulled a wage list of well-paying, imagination-stirring jobs in England.  There were all sorts of jobs from toy-making at $8.25 a week to glass-blowing at $20.  On the face of the little girl as she told me that she would meet me at the ministry of munitions the next morning there was a look of worried indecision.

That night along Gloucester street, past the Georgian mansion houses built before the union of Ireland and England—­great, flat-faced, uprising structures behind whose verdigrised knockers and shattered door fans comes the murmur of tenements—­I walked till I came to a much polished brass plate lettered “St. Anthony’s Working Girls’ Home.”

“Why don’t you go to England?” was the first question the matron put to me when I told her that I could get no factory work.  “All the girls are going.”

In the stone-flagged cellar the girls were cooking their individual dinners at a stove deep set in the stone wall.  A big, curly-haired girl was holding bread on a fork above the red coals.

“Last time I got lonesome,” she was admitting.  “But the best parlor maid job here is $60 a year.  And over at Basingstoke in England I’ve one waiting for me at $150 a year.  If you want to live nowadays I suppose you’ve gotta be lonesome.”