Yet factory girls who are subjected to this overstrain and overtime
often find their greatest discouragement in the fact that after all
their efforts they earn too little to support themselves. One girl said
that she had first yielded to temptation when she had become utterly
discouraged because she had tried in vain for seven months to save
enough money for a pair of shoes. She habitually spent two dollars a
week for her room, three dollars for her board, and sixty cents a week
for carfare, and she had found the forty cents remaining from her weekly
wage of six dollars inadequate to do more than re-sole her old shoes
twice. When the shoes became too worn to endure a third soling and she
possessed but ninety cents towards a new pair, she gave up her struggle;
to use her own contemptuous phrase, she "sold out for a pair of shoes."

Usually the phrases are less graphic, but after all they contain the
same dreary meaning: "Couldn't make both ends meet," "I had always been
used to having nice things," "Couldn't make enough money to live on," "I
got sick and ran behind," "Needed more money," "Impossible to feed and
clothe myself," "Out of work, hadn't been able to save." Of course a
girl in such a strait does not go out deliberately to find illicit
methods of earning money, she simply yields in a moment of utter
weariness and discouragement to the temptations she has been able to
withstand up to that moment. The long hours, the lack of comforts, the
low pay, the absence of recreation, the sense of "good times" all about
her which she cannot share, the conviction that she is rapidly losing
health and charm, rouse the molten forces within her. A swelling tide of
self-pity suddenly storms the banks which have hitherto held her and
finally overcomes her instincts for decency and righteousness, as well
as the habit of clean living, established by generations of her
forebears.