Her mute life and mechanical days could make one understand in her with every sympathy all kinds of unreasoning prejudices and aversions.

She was very young; and it was partly her youth which deepened all the sense of dumb oppression and exhaustion her still presence and appealing eyes imparted.  There is a great deal of talk about the danger and sadness of dissipation in youth.  Too little is said of the fact that such an enclosing monotony and stark poverty of existence as Anna Flodin’s is in youth sadness itself, as cruel to the pulses in its numb passage as the painful sense of wreck.  All tragedies are not those of violence, but of depletion, too, and of starvation.

The drain and exhaustion experienced after a day of speeding at a machine was described by another worker, a girl of good health and lively mind, who afterwards found more attractive employment.  She said that in her factory days she used to walk home, a distance of a mile, at nine o’clock, after her work was done, with a cousin.  The cousin was another clever and spirited Russian girl of the same age.  They had a hundred things to talk about, but as they left the factory, one would almost always say to the other:  “Please do not speak to me on my way home.  I am so tired I can scarcely answer.”  Instantly after supper they went to bed.  In the morning they hurried through breakfast to be at the factory at eight, to go through the round of the day before.

“We only went from bed to work, and from work to bed again,” one of the girls said, “and sometimes if we sat up a little while at home, we were so tired we could not speak to the rest, and we hardly knew what they were talking about.  And still, although there was nothing for us but bed and machine, we could not earn enough to take care of ourselves through the slack season.”

It is significant to compare with the account of these ill-paid operatives, exhausted from speeding, the chronicle of a skilled worker in a belt-factory, Theresa Luther, earning $17 a week.

She was a young German-American Protestant woman of 27, born in New York.  After her father died, she instantly helped her older brother shoulder the support of the family, as readily as though she had been a capable and adventurous boy.  Strong, competent, and high-spirited, Miss Luther was a tall girl, fair-haired, with dark blue eyes, and a very beautiful direct glance.

Her father had been a wood-carver, an artist responsible for some of the most interesting work in his craft done in New York.  Theresa, too, had dexterity with her hands.  At the age of fifteen she entered a leather belt factory as a “trimmer.”  She was so quick that she earned almost immediately $7 a week, a remarkable wage for a beginner of fifteen.  Soon she was permitted to fold and pack.  Not long afterwards, overhearing a forewoman lamenting the absence of machine operatives, she observed that she could run a sewing-machine at home.  The forewoman, amused, placed her at the machine.  After that she had stitched belts for eleven years, though not in the same factory.