Her place to sleep, and breakfast and dinner, in a tenement, cost $2.50 a week.  She paid the same for her younger brother, who still attended school.  The weekly expense was palpably increased by 60 cents a week for luncheon and 30 cents for carfare to ride to work.  She walked home, fifteen blocks.

Her clothing, during the eight months of work, had cost about $40.  Of this, $8 had been spent for four pairs of shoes.  Two ready-made skirts had cost $9, and a jacket $10.  Her expense for waists was only the cost of material, as she had made them herself.

She spent 35 cents a week for the theatre, and economized by doing her own washing.

Here are the budgets of some shirt-waist operatives earning from $7 to $10 a week, less skilled than the workers described above, but more skilled than Natalya.

Irena Kovalova, a girl of sixteen, supported herself and three other people, her mother and her younger brother and sister, on her slight wage of $9 a week.  She was a very beautiful girl, short, but heavily built, with grave dark eyes, a square face, and a manner more mature and responsible than that of many women of forty.  Irena Kovalova had not been out of work for one whole week in the year she described.  She had never done night work; but she had almost always worked half a day on Sunday—­except in slack weeks.  She was not certain how many of these there had been; but there had been enough slack time to reduce her income for her family for the year to $450.  They had paid $207 rent for four rooms on the East Side, and had lived on the remaining $243, all of which Irena had given to her mother.

Her mother helped her with her washing, and she had worn the clothes she had the year before, with the exception of shoes.  She had been forced to buy four pairs of these at $2 a pair.  They all realized that if Irena could spend a little more for her shoes they would wear longer.  “But for shoes,” she said, with a little laugh, “two dollars—­it is the most I ever could pay.”

She was a girl of unusual health and strength, and though sometimes very weary at night and troubled with eye strain from watching the needle, it was a different drain of her vitality that she mentioned as alarming.  She was obliged to work at a time of the month when she normally needed rest, and endured anguish at her machine at this season.  She had thought, she said gravely, that if she ever had any money ahead, she would try to use it to have a little rest then.

Molly Zaplasky, a little Russian shirt-waist worker of fifteen, operated a machine for fifty-six hours a week, did her own washing, and even went to evening school.  She had worked for five months, earning $9 a week for five weeks of this time, and sometimes $6, sometimes $7, for the remainder.  She and her sister Dora, of seventeen, also a shirt-waist maker, had a room with a cousin’s family on the East Side.