The “rush” had begun when Miss Johnson was transferred in this Christmas week from the neckwear to the muffler department on the first floor of one of the cheaper stores.  All the girls stood all day long—­from eight to twelve and from one to eight at night on the first days; from one at noon to ten and eleven at night, as the season progressed; and, on the last dreadful nights, from noon to the following midnight.  The girls had 35 cents supper money.  Except for that, all this extra labor was unpaid for.

The work was incessant.  The girls were nervous, hateful, spiteful with one another.  The manager, a beautiful and extremely rough girl of nineteen, swore constantly at all of them.  The customers were grabbing, insistent, unreasonable from morning to evening, from evening to midnight.  Behind the counter, with the advance of the day, the place became an inferno of nervous exhaustion and exasperation.  In the two weeks of Miss Johnson’s service one customer once thanked her; and one tipped her 5 cents for the rapid return of a parcel.  Both these acts of consideration took place in the morning.  Miss Johnson said that this was fortunate for her, as, at one word of ordinary consideration toward the end of her long day’s work, she thought she must have burst into tears.

There was a little bundler in the department, Catriona Malatesta, a white, hungry-looking little North Italian of fourteen with a thin chin and a dark-shadowed, worried face.  She had an adored sick sister of four, besides six other younger brothers and sisters, and a worshipped mother, to whom she gave every cent of her wages of three dollars and a half a week.  An older brother, a day laborer, paid the rent and provided food for all of them.  Every other family expense was met by Catriona’s three dollars and a half, so that she was in the habit of spending only five cents for her own lunch, and, on the nights of overtime, five cents for her own dinner, in order to take home the extra thirty cents; and every day she looked whiter and older.

At the beginning of the week before Christmas, the store raised Catriona’s wage to four dollars.  Her mother told her she might have the extra half dollar for herself for Christmas.  Though Catriona had worked for some months, this was the first money of her own she had ever had.  With pride she told the department how it was to be spent.  She was going to surprise her mother with a new waist for Christmas, a waist Catriona had seen in the store marked down to forty-nine cents.  A ten per cent discount was allowed to employees, so that the waist would cost forty-five cents.  With the remaining five cents Catriona would buy her sick Rosa a doll.  All her life Rosa had wanted a doll.  Now, at last, she could have one.

On the day when she received the money, Catriona kept it close at hand, in a little worn black leather purse, in a shabby bag hanging from her arm, and not out of sight for an instant.