The scheme was as simple as it was cruel.  A concern calling itself “The Sewing Aid Association” advertised for sewing-women, offering from ten to fifteen dollars a week to workers; experience not necessary.  Maggie Breen answered the advertisement.  The manager explained to her that the job was making children’s underclothing from pattern.  She would be required to come daily to the factory and sew on a machine which she would purchase from the company, the price, thirty dollars, being reckoned as her first three weeks’ wages.  To all this, duly set forth in a specious contract, the girl affixed her signature.

She was set to work at once.  The labor was hard, the forewoman a driver, but ten dollars a week is good pay.  Hoping for a possible raise Maggie turned out more garments than any of her fellow workers.  For two weeks and a half all went well.  In another few days the machine would be paid for, the money would begin to come in, and Maggie would get a really square meal, which she had come to long for with a persistent and severe hankering.  Then the trap was sprung.  Maggie’s work was found “unsatisfactory.”  She was summarily discharged.  In vain did she protest.  She would try again; she would do better.  No use; “the house” found her garments unmarketable.  Sorrowfully she asked for her money.  No money was due her.  Again she protested.  The manager thrust a copy of her contract under her nose and turned her into the street.  Thus the “Sewing Aid Association” had realized upon fifteen days’ labor for which they had not paid one cent, and the “installment” sewing-machine was ready for its next victim.  This is a very pleasant and profitable policy and is in use, in one form or another, in nearly every American city.  Proof of which the sufficiently discerning eye may find in the advertising columns of many of our leading newspapers and magazines.

To Maggie Breen it was small consolation that she was but one of many.  Even her simple mind grasped the “joker” in the contract.  She tore up that precious document, went home, reflected that she was rather hungry and likely to be hungrier, quite wretched and likely to be wretcheder; and so made a decoction of sulphur matches and drank it.  An ambulance surgeon disobligingly arrived in time to save her life for once; but the second time she borrowed some carbolic acid, which is more expeditious than any ambulance surgeon.

This was the story which “Kitty the Cutie,” while sticking close to the facts, had contrived to inform with a woman’s wrath and a woman’s pity.  Reading it, Hal took fire.  He determined to back it up with an editorial.  But first he would look into the matter for himself.  With this end in view he set out for Number 65 Sperry Street, where Maggie Breen’s younger sister and bedridden mother lived.  It was his maiden essay at reporting.