Dora had worked a year and a half.  She, too, earned $9 a week in full weeks.  But there had been only twenty-two such weeks in that period.  For seventeen weeks she had earned $6 a week.  For four weeks she had been idle because of slackness of work, and for nine weeks recently she had been too ill to work, having developed tuberculosis.  Dora, too, did her own washing.  She made her own waists, and went to evening school.  She had paid $2.75 a week for partial board and for lodging.  The food, not included in her board, cost about $1 a week.  The little Molly had paid for Dora’s board and lodging in her nine weeks’ illness.  Dora, who had worked so valiantly, was quietly expecting just as valiantly her turn in the long waiting list of applicants for the Montefiore Home for consumptives.  She knew that the chance of her return to Molly was very slight.

Her expenditure for food, shelter, and clothing for the year had been as follows:  room and board (exclusive of nine weeks’ illness), $161.25; clothing, $41.85; total, $203.10.  As her income for the year had been $297.50, this left a balance of $94.40 for all other expenses.  Items for clothing had been:  suit, $12; jacket, $4.50; a hat, $2.50; shoes (two pairs), $4.25; stockings (two pairs a week at 15 cents), $15.60; underwear, $3; total, $41.85.

One point should be accentuated in this budget—­the striking cost of stockings, due to the daily walk to and from work and the ill little worker’s lack of strength and time for darning.  The outlay for footwear in all the budgets of the operators is heavy, in spite of the fact that much of their work is done sitting.

Here are the budgets of some of the shirt-waist makers who were earning Natalya’s wage of $6 a week, or less than this wage.

Rea Lupatkin, a shirt-waist maker of nineteen, had been in New York only ten months, and was at first a finisher in a cloak factory.  Afterward, obtaining work as operator in a waist factory, she could get $4 in fifty-six hours on a time basis.  She had been in this factory six weeks.

Rea was paying $4 a month for lodging in two rooms of a tenement-house with a man and his wife and baby and little boy.  She saved carfare by a walk of three-quarters of an hour, adding daily one and a half hours to the nine and a half already spent in operating.  Her food cost $2.25 a week so that, with 93 cents a week for lodging, her regular weekly cost of living was $3.18, leaving her 82 cents for every other expense.  In spite of this, and although she had been forced to spend $3 for examination of her eyes and for eyeglasses, Rea contrived to send an occasional $2 back to her family in Europe.

Ida Bergeson, a little girl of fifteen, was visited at half past eight o’clock one evening, in a tenement on the lower East Side.  The gas was burning brightly in the room; several people were talking; and this frail-looking little Ida lay on a couch in their midst, sleeping, in all the noise and light, in complete exhaustion.  Her sister said that every night the child returned from the factory utterly worn out, she was obliged to work so hard and so fast.