In this way she lived in New York for a year, during which time she managed to send $90 home, for the others.

Her sister Bertha, next younger than herself, had then come to New York, and obtained work at sewing for a little less than $6 a week.  Between them, in the following six months, the two girls managed to buy a passage ticket from Russia to New York for $42, and to send home $30.  This, with the passage ticket and two other tickets, which they purchased on the instalment plan from a dealer, at a profit to him of $20, brought all the rest of the family into New York harbor—­the girls’ mother, their three younger sisters of fifteen, fourteen, and eight, and a little brother of seven.

Five months afterward Molly and Bertha were still making payments for these extortionate tickets.

In New York, the sister of fifteen found employment in running ribbons into corset covers, earning from $1 to $1.50 a week.  The fourteen-year-old girl was learning operating on waists.  The family of seven lived in two rooms, paying for them $13.50 a month; their food cost $9 or $10 a week; shoes came to at least $1 a week; the girls made most of their own clothing, and for this purpose they were paying $1 a month for a sewing-machine; and they gave $1 a month for the little brother’s Hebrew schooling.

Molly was seen in the course of a coat makers’ strike.  She wept because the family’s rent was due and she had no means of paying it.  She said she suffered from headache and from backache.  Every month she lost a day’s work through illness.

She was only nineteen years old.  By working every hour she could make a fair wage, but, owing to the uncertain and spasmodic nature of the work, she was unable to depend upon earning enough to maintain even a fair standard of living.

A point that should be accentuated in Molly Davousta’s account is the price of shoes.  No one item of expense among working girls is more suggestive.  The cost of shoes is unescapable.  A girl may make over an old hat with a bit of ribbon or a flower, or make a new dress from a dollar’s worth of material, but for an ill-fitting, clumsy pair of shoes she must pay at least $2; and no sooner has she bought them than she must begin to skimp because in a month or six weeks she will need another pair.  The hour or two hours’ walk each day through streets thickly spread, oftener than not, with a slimy, miry dampness literally dissolves these shoes.  Long after up-town streets are dry and clean, those of the congested quarters display the muddy travesty of snow in the city.  The stockings inside these cheap shoes, with their worn linings, wear out even more quickly than the shoes.  It is practically impossible to mend stockings besides walking to work, making one’s waists, and doing one’s washing.

All Molly Davousta’s cares, her anxiety about shoes and her foreboding concerning seasonal work, were increased by her position of family responsibility.