Annie Donnelly’s case will serve as further illustration.  Annie Donnelly’s father was a sober, decent man of forty, who drove a cab from twelve to fifteen hours every day in the year, Sundays and holidays included.  Before the cab drivers’ strike, a year or two ago, Donnelly’s wages were fifteen dollars a week, and the family lived in a four-room tenement, for which they paid $5.50 a week.  You pay rent weekly to a tenement landlord.  Since the strike wages are fourteen dollars a week for cab drivers, and this fall the Donnelly rent went up fifty cents a week.

The Donnelly tenement was a very desirable one, having but a single dark, windowless room, instead of two or three, like most New York tenements.  There were three children younger than Annie, who was fourteen.  The family of five made a fairly tight fit in four rooms.  Nevertheless, when the rent went up to six dollars Mrs. Donnelly took a lodger.  She had to or move and, remember, this was a desirable tenement because it had only one dark room.

One day the lodger asked Annie if she did not want to go to a dance.  Annie did want to, but she knew very well that her mother would not allow her to go.  Once a year the entire family, including the baby, attended the annual ball of the Coachman’s Union, but that was another thing.  Annie was too young for dances her mother declared.

The Donnellys paid for and occupied three rooms, but they really lived in one room, the others being too filled with beds to be habitable except at night.  The kitchen, the one living-room, was uncomfortably crowded at meal times.  At no time was there any privacy.  It was impossible for Annie to receive her girl friends in her home.  Every bit of her social life had to be lived out of the house.

When the weather was warm she often stayed in the street, walking about with the other girls or sitting on a friend’s doorstep, until ten or even eleven o’clock at night.  Every one does the same in a crowded city neighborhood.  There comes a time in a girl’s life when this sort of thing becomes monotonous.  The time came when Annie found sitting on the doorstep and talking about nothing in particular entirely unbearable.  So one balmy, inviting spring night she slipped away and went with the lodger to a dance.

The dance hall occupied a big, low-ceiled basement room in a building which was a combination of saloon and tenement house.  In one of the front windows of the basement room was hung a gaudy placard:  “The Johnny Sullivan Social Club.”

The lodger paid no admission, but he deposited ten cents for a hat check, after which they went in.  About thirty couples were swinging in a waltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust which followed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electric lights were dimmed.  Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiest best with a popular waltz tune.

In a few minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the heat and the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music was piercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it.  When the waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping with the heat, and swaying with the giddiness of the dance.