Elena had come from South Russia to seek her fortunes when she was sixteen years old.  Her mother and father were dead.  She had been educated by an uncle, with whom her younger sister, Gerda, remained.

According to the testimony of Elena’s brother-in-law, the kind-hearted husband of a married sister living in New York, and also according to the testimony of Gerda, Elena at sixteen was a very beautiful girl.  She was small, but very strong and well knit, with a fresh, glowing color, deep gray eyes, and heavy reddish gold hair, growing low upon her forehead in a widow’s peak.

Elena first found work as a cigarette roller, earning $4 a week.  Here she was subjected to constant insolence and scurrilous language from the foreman and the men working with her.  Her eyes turned black with contempt when she spoke of this offence—­“Oh” she exclaimed, “I thought, ’I am poor, but I will never in my life be so poor as to stand things like that.’”

She left the tobacco factory and found employment as a neckwear worker.  Here, too, she earned $4, but the season grew dull, and she entered a small factory, where she worked on children’s dresses, embroidering, buttonholing, faggoting, and feather-stitching.  In this craft she proved to have such deftness, nicety of touch, and speed that she could do in an hour twice as much as most of the other girls and women in the factory.

She sewed from eight to six, with half an hour for lunch.  She always took work home and sometimes she sewed for half of Sunday, for living expenses consumed all of her $4 a week.  Her stomach had failed her in the intensity of her occupation and from the insufficient food she was able to purchase, and she needed all the extra money she could earn for doctor’s bills and medicine.

She was thin, spent, worn, and pale, when Gerda came over from Russia, four years after Elena had arrived.  Gerda was a strong, attractive girl, with good health, dark curling hair, and a lovely color.

Entering the same factory with Elena, she soon became almost as able as her sister in fine sewing, and almost as ill.  She earned $3 a week.

The factory was owned by a young German widow, Mrs. Mendell, an extremely attractive, pretty, and skilful person, appearing in her office an agreeable and well-educated young woman, and able to produce the most engaging little dresses, caps, and undermuslins for children, at a high profit, by paying extremely small wages to skilled immigrant seamstresses.  In her workroom, Mrs. Mendell alternately terrorized and flattered the girls.  She speeded them constantly.  Unless they had done as much work as she wished to accomplish through the day, she refused to speak to them.  She made the younger girls put on her boots, and dress her when she changed her office frock for the clothes in which she motored home at night.  And in the morning she punished girls who had not finished as much work as she wished over night by giving them the worst paid and hardest sewing in the factory.