A number of girls also came early in the morning as soon as the rest rooms were open.  They washed their faces and arranged their hair and then settled to sleep in the largest and easiest chairs the room afforded.  Some of these were out-of-work girls also determined to take home their wages at the end of the week, each pretending to her mother that she had spent the night with a girl friend and was working all day as usual.  How much of this deception is due to parental tyranny and how much to a sense of responsibility for younger children or invalids, it is impossible to estimate until the number of such recorded cases is much larger.  Certain it is that the long habit of obedience, as well as the feeling of family obligation established from childhood, is often utilized by the white slave trafficker.

Difficult as is the position of the girl out of work when her family is exigent and uncomprehending, she has incomparably more protection than the girl who is living in the city without home ties.  Such girls form sixteen per cent. of the working women of Chicago.  With absolutely every penny of their meagre wages consumed in their inadequate living, they are totally unable to save money.  That loneliness and detachment which the city tends to breed in its inhabitants is easily intensified in such a girl into isolation and a desolating feeling of belonging nowhere.  All youth resents the sense of the enormity of the universe in relation to the insignificance of the individual life, and youth, with that intense self-consciousness which makes each young person the very centre of all emotional experience, broods over this as no older person can possibly do.  At such moments a black oppression, the instinctive fear of solitude, will send a lonely girl restlessly to walk the streets even when she is “too tired to stand,” and when her desire for companionship in itself constitutes a grave danger.  Such a girl living in a rented room is usually without any place in which to properly receive callers.  An investigation was recently made in Kansas City of 411 lodging-houses in which young girls were living; less than 30 per cent. were found with a parlor in which guests might be received.  Many girls quite innocently permit young men to call upon them in their bedrooms, pitifully disguised as “sitting-rooms,” but the danger is obvious, and the standards of the girl gradually become lowered.

Certainly during the trying times when a girl is out of work she should have much more intelligent help than is at present extended to her; she should be able to avail herself of the state employment agencies much more than is now possible, and the work of the newly established vocational bureaus should be enormously extended.