For six months of these nine-hour days, she earned $8 or $8.50 a week.  During the other six months there was no work on Saturdays, and she earned about $7 a week.  She had a week’s vacation with pay.  She had lost during the year she described two months’ work from illness, due to her run-down condition.  This she said, however, was not caused by her work, but by combining with it, in an emergency, the care of the children of a sister, who had been sick.

Miss Cotton belonged to a benefit society and through her own illness she had received an allowance of $5 a week.

Her income for the year had been about $367, an average of $7.06 a week.

Miss Cotton had tried living in boarding-houses and furnished rooms, and although the expense was about the same, the places were much less attractive in every way than the hotel for working girls where she was staying at the time of the interview.

For half of a room a little larger than an ordinary hall bedroom and for breakfasts and dinners, she paid $4.50 a week.  Luncheons in addition cost her $1 a week.  As she was within walking distance of work, she had no other expense but 35 cents for part of her washing.  The rest she did herself.

She bought very little clothing, as out of the $1.15 a week she had left after paying every necessary expense, she generously helped to support a sick sister and niece.  After eighteen years of hard, steady work—­nine years of it skilled work—­she had saved nothing except in the form of benefit fees, and she had no prospect of saving.

Although she was nervously worn, and her eyesight was strained, she was less exhausted by her industrial experience than Katherine Ryan, an Irish worker of forty-five, who had been cutting and sewing trimmings for six years in an applique factory.

Eight and a quarter hours of this work a day exhausted her.  She received $7 a week.  Her eyes were fast failing her from the close watch she had to keep on her scissors to guard against cutting too far.

She often went to bed at eight or half past eight o’clock, worn out by one day’s task and eager to be fresh for the next, for she was hard pressed by the competition of young eyes and quick fingers.

Newer workers were given finer and more profitable work to do.  In spite of her faithfulness, and straining for speed, she was laid off two months earlier in the last season than in any previous year, and newer helpers were retained.  She thought the forewoman was prejudiced against her, and naturally could not understand the truth that from the standpoint of modern industry she was aged at forty-five.

She had been paying $3 a week for board in a philanthropic home, and there she was permitted to stay and to pay for her board and lodging when she had no money by helping with the housework.  Miss Ryan, however, had exhausted herself less rapidly than Elena and Gerda Nakov, two young Polish women of thirty-three and twenty-nine, skilled hand-workers on children’s dresses.