At the central office of the Young Women’s Christian Association I receive what attention a busy secretary can spare me.  She questions and I answer as best I can.

“What is it you want?”

“Board and work in a factory.”

“Have you ever worked in a factory?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Have you ever done any housework?”

She talks in the low, confidential tone of those accustomed to reforming prisoners and reasoning with the poor.

“Yes, ma’am, I have done housework.”

“What did you make?”

“Twelve dollars a month.”

“I can get you a place where you will have a room to yourself and fourteen dollars a month.  Do you want it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Are you making anything now?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Can you afford to pay board?”

“Yes, as I hope to get work at once.”

She directs me to a boarding place which is at the same time a refuge for the friendless and a shelter for waifs.  The newly arrived population of the fast-growing city seems unfamiliar with the address I carry written on a card.  I wait on cold street corners, I travel over miles of half-settled country, long stretches of shanties and saloons huddled close to the trolley line.  The thermometer is at zero.  Toward three o’clock I find the waif boarding-house.

The matron is in the parlour hovering over a gas stove.  She has false hair, false teeth, false jewelry, and the dry, crabbed, inquisitive manner of the idle who are entrusted with authority.  She is there to direct others and do nothing herself, to be cross and make herself dreaded.  In the distance I can hear a shrill, nasal orchestra of children’s voices.  I am cold and hungry.  I have as yet no job.  The noise, the sordidness, the witchlike matron annoy me.  I have a sudden impulse to flee, to seek warmth and food and proper shelter—­to snap my fingers at experience and be grateful I was born among the fortunate.  Something within me calls Courage!  I take a room at three dollars a week with board, put my things in it, and while my feet yet ache with cold I start to find a factory, a pickle factory, which, the matron tells me, is run by a Christian gentleman.

I have felt timid and even overbold at different moments in my life, but never so audacious as on entering a factory door marked in gilt letters:  “Women Employees.”

The Cerberus between me and the fulfilment of my purpose is a gray-haired timekeeper with kindly eyes.  He sits in a glass cage and about him are a score or more of clocks all ticking soundly and all surrounded by an extra dial of small numbers running from one to a thousand.  Each number means a workman—­each tick of the clock a moment of his life gone in the service of the pickle company.  I rap on the window of the glass cage.  It opens.

“Do you need any girls?” I ask, trying not to show my emotion.