pleasures in the normal, healthy fashion of other young people. The
position of the women of this class is not very high. Men do not treat
her as an equal. They woo her for a wife. In the same manner the boy
does not play with the girl. The relations between young people very
readily degenerate. The dance hall, with its curse of drink, its lack of
chaperonage and of reasonable discipline, helps this along its downward
course.

Sadie Greenbaum, as I will call her, was an exceptionally attractive
young Jewish girl of fifteen when I first knew her. Although not
remarkably bright in school she was industrious, and aspired to be a
stenographer. She was not destined to realize her ambition. As soon as
she finished grammar school she was served, so to speak, with her
working papers. The family needed additional income, not to meet actual
living expenses, for the Greenbaums were not acutely poor, but in order
that the only son of the family might go to college. Max was seventeen,
a selfish, overbearing prig of a boy, fully persuaded of his superiority
over his mother and sisters, and entirely willing that the family should
toil unceasingly for his advancement.

Sadie accepted the situation meekly, and sought work in a muslin
underwear factory. At eighteen she was earning seven dollars a week as a
skilled operator on a tucking machine. She sat down to her work every
morning at eight o'clock, and for four hours watched with straining eyes
a tucking foot which carried eight needles and gathered long strips of
muslin into eight fine tucks, at the rate of four thousand stitches a
minute. The needles, mere flickering flashes of white light above the
cloth, had to be watched incessantly lest a thread break and spoil the
continuity of a tuck. When you are on piece wages you do not relish
stopping the machine and doing over a yard or two of work.