Are you willing to know the facts about the world, the underworld, from which the girl who cooks your food and takes care of your children is drawn?  Do you care to know how a domestic spends the time between places, how she gets to your kitchen or nursery, the kind of homes she may have been in before she came to you?  Make a little descent into that underworld with a girl whose experience is matched with those of many others.

Nellie B——­ was an Irish girl, strong, pretty of face, and joyful of temperament.  The quiet Indiana town where she earned her living as a cook offered Nellie so little diversion that she determined to go to Chicago to live.  She gave up her place, and with a month’s wages in her pocket went to the city.

It was late in the afternoon when her train reached the station.  Nellie alighted, bewildered and lonely.  She had the address of an employment agency, furnished her by an acquaintance.  Nellie slept that night, or rather tossed sleepless in the agency lodging house, on a dirty bed occupied by two women besides herself.  In all her life she had never been inside such a filthy room, or heard such frightful conversation.  Therefore next morning she gladly paid her exorbitant bill of one dollar and seventy-five cents, besides a fee of two dollars and a half for obtaining employment, and accepted the first place offered her.

The house she was taken to seemed to be conducted rather strangely.  Meals were at unusual hours, and the household consisted largely of young women who received many men callers.  For about a week Nellie did her work unmolested.  At the end of the week her mistress presented her with a low-necked satin dress and asked her if she would not like to assist in entertaining the men.  Simple-minded Nellie had to have the nature of the entertaining explained to her, and she had great difficulty in leaving the house after she had declined the offer.  She had hardly any money left, and the woman refused to pay her for her week’s work.

Nellie knew of no other employment agency, so she was obliged to return to the one she left.  When she reproached the agent for sending her to a disreputable house he shrugged his shoulders and replied:  “Well, I send girls where they’re wanted.  If they don’t like the place they can leave.”

The fact is, they cannot always leave when they want to.  Miss Kellor’s investigators found an office in Chicago which sent girls to a resort in Wisconsin which was represented as a summer hotel.  This notorious place was surrounded by a high stockade which rendered escape impossible.

The investigators found offices in other cities which operate disreputable houses in summer places.  To these the proprietors send the handsomest of their applicants for honest work.

Three girls sent to a house of this kind found themselves prisoners.  One girl made such a disturbance by screaming and crying that the proprietor literally kicked her out of the house.  The investigators for the Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research saw this girl in a hospital, insane and dying from the treatment she had received.  Another of the three escaped from the place.  She, too, was discovered in a state of dementia.  The fate of the third girl is obscure.