But the rooms were airy and attractive.  Having now their own furnishings, they paid only $8 a month for all this added space and comfort, so that they could continue to live in these accommodations, but only with severe effort and industry on Elena’s part.  For Gerda’s optic nerve was now so affected by strain, and she suffered so from indigestion, faintness, and illness, that she was unable to go to the factory.  She kept the house, doing some sewing at home.

Elena’s wages during the next six years, by struggle after struggle with Mrs. Mendell, were raised to $7 a week after her thirteen years of service.  But she was nearly frantic with alarm over her failing health.  She was thin and frail, and eating almost nothing from gastritis.

At last a woman physician she saw told her she must stop work or she would die.  Her stomach was almost completely worn out.  This doctor sent her to a hospital, and visited Gerda and sent her, too, to a hospital.

This was four years ago.  But both the young women are so broken down that no efforts of public or private philanthropic medical care in the state and the city have been able to restore their health.  The doctors in whose charge they have been say that these young women’s strength is simply worn out from these years of overwork and strain and poor and scanty food, and that they can never again be really well.

They leave the hospitals or sanatoria for a few weeks of wage-earning, six, at the most, to return again ill and unable to do any work at all.  Their life is now indeed a curious modern pilgrimage among the various forms of charitable cure and the great charitable institutions of the community which is entirely unable to return to them the strength they have lost in its industries.

It may be pointed out that the exhaustion of these two workers has involved a loss and expense not only to themselves, but to the factory management, which has been obliged to employ in Elena’s place two other less skilful embroiderers, and to the taxpayers and the philanthropists of New York who support charity hospitals and vacation homes.

These chronicles express as clearly as possible, in the order followed, monotony and speeding in factory work among younger and older women, operatives and hand-workers.

While one of the strangest results of the introduction of machinery into modern industry is that instead of liberating the human powers and initiative of the workers, it has often tended to devitalize and warp these forces to the functions of machines, yet this result is so strange that it cannot seem inevitable.  Speeding for long hours at machines, rather than machine labor itself, appears most widely responsible for the fatigue described by the operatives whose trade histories have been narrated.  Further, speeding and long hours were responsible for the most drastic experience of exhaustion related among all the factory workers encountered—­the experience of Elena and Gerda Nikov, who were employed not at machines, but in handiwork so delicate it might with more accuracy be called a handicraft.