She still lived with them, sharing a room with her sister, and paying $3 a week for her lodging, with board and part of her washing.  She did the rest of her washing, and made some of her sister’s clothes and all of her own.  This skill had enabled her to have for $5.20, the cost of the material, the pretty spring suit she wore—­a coat, skirt, and jumper, of cloth much too thin to protect her from the chill of the weather, but stylishly cut and becoming.

In idle times she had done a little sewing for friends, for her income had been quite inadequate.  During the twenty-two weeks she had been in the factory she had had full work for eleven and one-half weeks, at $6; half-time for eight and one-half weeks, at $3; and two weeks of slack work, in each of which she earned only $1.50.

She had no money at all to spend for recreation; and, in her hopelessness of the future and her natural thirst for pleasure, she sometimes accepted it from chance men acquaintances met on the street.

Another unskilled worker of twenty, Sarina Bashkitseff, intended to escape from her monotonous work and low wage by educating herself in a private evening school.

For this she contrived to save $4 a month out of her income of $4 a week.  Sarina packed powders in a drug factory from eight to six o’clock, with three-quarters of an hour for lunch.  She was a beautiful and brilliant girl, who used to come to work in the winter dressed in her summer coat, with a little woollen under-jacket to protect her from the cold, and a plain cheap felt hat, much mocked at by the American girls.  Sarina scorned the mental scope of these girls; scorned to spend for dress, money with which she could learn to read “Othello” and “King Lear” in the original; and scorned to spend in giggling the lunch hour, in which she might read in Yiddish newspapers the latest tidings of the struggle in Russia.

In the drug factory, and in her East Side hall bedroom, she lived in a world of her own—­a splendid, generous world of the English tragedies she studied at night school, and of the thrilling hopes and disappointments of the Russian revolution.

She had been in New York a year.  In this time she had worked in an artificial flower factory, earning from $2 to $2.25 a week; then as a cutter in a box factory, where she had $3 a week at first, and then $5, for ten hours’ work a day.  She left this place because the employer was very lax about payment, and sometimes cheated her out of small amounts.  She then tried finishing men’s coats; but working from seven-thirty to twelve and from one to six daily brought her only $3 a week and severe exhaustion.[19]

From her present wage of $4 she spent 60 cents a week for carfare and $4.25 a month for her share of a tenement hall bedroom.  Although she did not live with them, her mother and father were in New York, and she had her dinners with them, free of cost.  Her luncheon cost her from 7 to 10 cents a day, and her breakfast consisted of 1-1/2 cents’ worth of rolls.