Minna paid $3 a month for sleeping space in a tenement; $1.75 a week for suppers; and for breakfasts and luncheons, from 15 to 30 cents a day.

She wore a black sateen waist, which had cost $1.  A suit had cost $8; a hat, $3; and a pair of shoes, $2.  Working her hardest and fastest, she had not received enough money to pay for even these meagre belongings, and was obliged to have assistance from her brother, her only relative in New York.

Every line of Minna’s little figure looked overworked.  This was true, too, of Sadie, a little underfed, grayish Austrian girl of seventeen, who had come to New York as the advance guard of her family.

In the last year since her arrival, two and one-half years before, she had first been employed for seven months in a neckwear factory, where she earned from $2.50 a week to $6 and $7 on piece-work.  In two very busy weeks she had earned $9 a week.

After the slack season, the factory closed.  Hunting desperately for a way to make money, Sadie found employment as an operative on children’s dresses, running a foot-power machine in a tenement work-room for $2.50 a week.  In the second week her wage was advanced to $3 and continued at this for the next three or four months.

After this, the demand for neckwear had increased again.  She had returned to the neckwear factory, and was earning $6 a week.  Her busiest days were eleven hours long, and her others nine.

She spent nothing for pleasure.  She could send nothing to her family.  In the course of two years and a half she had bought one hat for $3 and a suit for $12.  She went to night school, but was generally so weary that she could learn really nothing.  She did her own washing, and for $3 a month she rented a sleeping space in the kitchen of a squalid, crowded East Side tenement.  It was the living-room of her poverty-stricken landlady’s family; and she had to wait until they all left it, sometimes late at night, before she dragged her bed out of an obscure corner and flung it on the floor for her long-desired sleep.  Supper with the landlady cost her 20 cents a night.  Sadie’s breakfasts and dinners depended absolutely upon her income and her other expenses.  As in the weeks when she was earning $3 she had only 90 cents for fourteen meals a week and her clothing, and in the weeks when she earned $2.50, only 40 cents a week for fourteen meals and her clothing, her depleted health is easily understood.

Sadie’s custom of paying rent and yet dragging a pallet out of the corner and finding or waiting for a place to throw it in, like a little vagrant, is very characteristic of East Side tenements.  She paid $36 a year for lodging, and yet can scarcely be said to have received for this sum any definite space at all under a roof-tree, honestly provided for her as her own, but simply the chance of getting such a place when she could.