factory girls, who are much less open to direct inducement and to the
temptations which come through sheer imitation. Factory girls also have
the protection of working among plain people who frankly designate an
irregular life, in harsh, old-fashioned terms. If a factory girl catches
sight of the vicious life at all, she sees its miserable victims in all
the wretchedness and sordidness of their trade in the poorer parts of
the city. As she passes the opening doors of a disreputable saloon she
may see for an instant three or four listless girls urging liquor upon
men tired out with the long day's work and already sodden with drink. As
she hurries along the street on a rainy night she may hear a sharp cry
of pain from a sick-looking girl whose arm is being brutally wrenched by
a rough man, and if she stops for a moment she catches his muttered
threats in response to the girl's pleading "that it is too bad a night
for street work." She sees a passing policeman shrug his shoulders as he
crosses the street, and she vaguely knows that the sick girl has put
herself beyond the protection of the law, and that the rough man has an
understanding with the officer on the beat. She has been told that
certain streets are "not respectable," but a furtive look down the
length of one of them reveals only forlorn and ill-looking houses, from
which all suggestion of homely domesticity has long since gone; a
slovenly woman with hollow eyes and a careworn face holding up the
lurching bulk of a drunken man is all she sees of its "denizens,"
although she may have known a neighbor's daughter who came home to die
of a mysterious disease said to be the result of a "fast life," and
whose disgraced mother "never again held up her head."

Yet in spite of all this corrective knowledge, the increasing nervous
energy to which industrial processes daily accommodate themselves, and
the speeding up constantly required of the operators, may at any moment
so register their results upon the nervous system of a factory girl as