Katia worked with a one-needle machine in a small factory off lower Broadway.  Before that she had been employed as a week worker in a Fifth Avenue corset factory, which may be called Madame Cora’s.  Shortly before Katia left this establishment, Madame Cora changed her basis of payment from week work to piece-work.  The girls’ speed increased.  Some of the more rapid workers who had before made $10 were able to make $12.  On discovering this, Madame Cora cut their wages, not by frankly returning to the old basis, but by suddenly beginning to charge the girls for thread and needles.  She made them pay her 2 cents for every needle.  Thread on a five-needle machine, sometimes with two eyes in each of the needles, stitches up very rapidly.  The girls were frequently obliged to pay from a dollar and a half to two dollars a week for the thread sewed into Madame Cora’s corsets, and for needles.  They rebelled when Madame Cora refused to pay for these materials herself.  From among the three hundred girls, thirty girls struck, went to Union headquarters, and asked to be organized.  But Madame Cora simply filled their places with other girls who were willing to supply her with thread for her corsets, and refused to take them back.  Katia did not respect Madame Cora’s methods, and had left before the strike.

Katia spent $2.50 a week for breakfast and dinner and for her share of a room with a congenial friend, another Russian girl, in Harlem.  The room was close and opened on an air-shaft, but was quiet and rather pleasant.  She paid from $1.25 to $1.50 for luncheons, and, out of the odd hundred dollars left from her income, had contrived, by doing her own washing and making her own waists, to buy all her clothing, and to spend $5 for books and magazines, $7 for grand opera, which she deeply loved, and $30 for an outing.  On account of her cleverness Katia was less at the mercy of unjust persons than some of the less skilful and younger girls.

Among these, Molly Davousta, another young machine operative, was struggling to make payments to an extortionate ticket seller, who had swindled her in the purchase of a steamboat ticket.

When Molly was thirteen, her mother and father, who had five younger children, had sent her abroad out of Russia, with the remarkable intention of having her prepare and provide a home for all of them in some other country.

Like Dick Whittington, the little girl went to London, though to seek, not only her own fortune, but that of seven other people.  After she had been in London for four years, her father died.  She and her next younger sister, Bertha, working in Russia, became the sole support of the family; and now, learning that wages were better in America, Molly, like Whittington, turned again and came to New York.

Here she found work on men’s coats, at a wage fluctuating from $5 to $9 a week.  She lived in part of a tenement room for a rent of $3 a month.  For supper and Saturday meals she paid $1.50 a week.  Other food she bought from groceries and push carts, at a cost of about $2 a week.  As she did her own washing, and walked to work, she had no other fixed expenses, except for shoes.  Once in every two months these wore to pieces and she was forced to buy new ones; and, till she had saved enough to pay for them, she went without her push cart luncheon and breakfast.