Ida received the same wage as Natalya—­$6 a week.  She worked fifty-six hours a week—­eight more than the law allows for minors.  She paid $4 a week for board and a room shared with the anxious older sister, who told about her experience.  Ida needed all the rest of her $2 for her clothing.  She did her own washing.  As the inquirer came away, leaving the worn little girl sleeping in her utter fatigue, she wondered with what strength Ida could enter upon her possible marriage and motherhood—­whether, indeed, she would struggle through to maturity.

Katia Halperian, a shirt-waist worker of fifteen, had been in New York only six months.  During twenty-one weeks of this time she was employed in a Wooster Street factory, earning for a week of nine-and-a-half-hour days only $3.50.  Katia, like Natalya, was a “trimmer.”

After paying $3 a week board to an aunt, she had a surplus of 50 cents for all clothing, recreation, doctor’s bills, and incidentals.

To save carfare she walked to her work—­about forty minutes’ distance.  Her aunt lived on the fourth floor of a tenement.  After working nine and a half hours and walking an hour and twenty minutes daily, Katia climbed four flights of stairs and then helped with the housework.

Sonia Lavretsky, a girl of twenty, had been self-supporting for four years.  She lived in a most wretched, ill-kept tenement, with a family who made artificial flowers.  She had been totally unable to find work for the last five months, but this family, though very poor, had kept her with them without payment through all this time.

She had been three months an operative, putting cuffs on waists.  Working on a time basis, she earned $3 the first week and $4 the second.  She was then put on piece-work, and in fifty-four hours and a half could earn only $3.  Laid off, she found employment at felling cloaks, earning from $3 to $6 a week.  But after twelve weeks, trade in this place also had grown dull.

During her idle time she became “run down” and was ill three weeks.  Fortunately, a brother was able to pay her doctor’s bills, until he also was laid off during part of her idle time.

When Sonia had any money she gave her landlady, for part of a room in the poor tenement with the flower-makers, $3.50 a month, and about $2.50 a week for food.  Before her dull season and slack work began, she had paid 20 cents a week dues to a self-education society and social club.

Her brother had given her all the clothing she had.  The burden of her support evidently fell heavily upon him and upon the poverty-stricken family of her hostess.  And Sonia was in deep discouragement.  She was about to go away from New York in hopes of finding work in Syracuse.

Getta Bursova, an attractive Russian girl of twenty, had worked for eight years—­ever since she was twelve.  She had been employed as a waist operative for six years in London and for two in New York.