My whole effort now is to find a respectable boarding-house.  I start out, the thermometer near zero, the snow falling.  I wander and ask, wander and ask.  Up and down the black streets running parallel and at right angles with the factory I tap and ring at one after another of the two-story red-brick houses.  More than half of them are empty, tenantless during the working hours.  What hope is there for family life near the hearth which is abandoned at the factory’s first call?  The sociableness, the discipline, the division of responsibility make factory work a dangerous rival to domestic care.  There is something in the modern conditions of labour which act magnetically upon American girls, impelling them to work not for bread alone, but for clothes and finery as well.  Each class in modern society knows a menace to its homes:  sport, college education, machinery—­each is a factor in the gradual transformation of family life from a united domestic group to a collection of individuals with separate interests and aims outside the home.

I pursue my search.  It is the dinner hour.  At last a narrow door opens, letting a puff of hot rank air blow upon me as I stand in the vestibule questioning:  “Do you take boarders?”

The woman who answers stands with a spoon in her hand, her eyes fixed upon a rear room where a stove, laden with frying-pans, glows and sputters.

“Come in,” she says, “and get warm.”

I walk into a front parlour with furniture that evidently serves domestic as well as social purposes.  There is a profusion of white knitted tidies and portieres that exude an odour of cooking.  Before the fire a workingman sits in a blue shirt and overalls.  Fresh from the barber’s hands, he has a clean mask marked by the razor’s edge.  Already I feel at home.

“Want board, do you?” the woman asks.  “Well, we ain’t got no place; we’re always right full up.”

My disappointment is keen.  Regretfully I leave the fire and start on again.

“I guess you’ll have some trouble in finding what you want,” the woman calls to me on her way back to the kitchen, as I go out.

The answer is everywhere the same, with slight variations.  Some take “mealers” only, some only “roomers,” some “only gentlemen.”  I begin to understand it.  Among the thousands of families who live in the city on account of the work provided by the mills, there are girls enough to fill the factories.  There is no influx such as creates in a small town the necessity for working-girl boarding-houses.  There is an ample supply of hands from the existing homes.  There is the same difference between city and country factory life that there is between university life in a capital and in a country town.

A sign on a neat-looking corner house attracts me.  I rap and continue to rap; the door is opened at length by a tall good-looking young woman.  Her hair curls prettily, catching the light; her eyes are stupid and beautiful.  She has on a black skirt and a bright purple waist.