uncertain what her total income had been before the last thirteen weeks.
At the beginning of this time she had left the skirt factory and become
a finisher in a waist factory, where she earned from $10 to $12 a week,
working nine and a half hours a day.

Her place to sleep, and breakfast and dinner, in a tenement, cost $2.50 a
week. She paid the same for her younger brother, who still attended
school. The weekly expense was palpably increased by 60 cents a week for
luncheon and 30 cents for carfare to ride to work. She walked home,
fifteen blocks.

Her clothing, during the eight months of work, had cost about $40. Of
this, $8 had been spent for four pairs of shoes. Two ready-made skirts
had cost $9, and a jacket $10. Her expense for waists was only the cost
of material, as she had made them herself.

She spent 35 cents a week for the theatre, and economized by doing her
own washing.

Here are the budgets of some shirt-waist operatives earning from $7 to
$10 a week, less skilled than the workers described above, but more
skilled than Natalya.

Irena Kovalova, a girl of sixteen, supported herself and three other
people, her mother and her younger brother and sister, on her slight wage
of $9 a week. She was a very beautiful girl, short, but heavily built,
with grave dark eyes, a square face, and a manner more mature and
responsible than that of many women of forty. Irena Kovalova had not been
out of work for one whole week in the year she described. She had never
done night work; but she had almost always worked half a day on