the suggestions of the life about her when she received a telegram from
Ellis Island stating that her mother had arrived in New York, but was
too ill to be sent on to Chicago. All of her money had gone for the
steamer ticket and as the thought of her old country mother, ill and
alone among strangers, was too much for her long fortitude, she made the
best bargain possible with the head waiter whose importunities she had
hitherto resisted, accepted the little purse the other Polish girls in
the hotel collected for her and arrived in New York only to find that
her mother had died the night before.

The simple obedience to parents on the part of these immigrant girls,
working in hotels and restaurants, often miscarries pathetically. Their
unspoiled human nature, not yet immune to the poisons of city life, when
thrust into the midst of that unrelieved drudgery which lies at the
foundation of all complex luxury, often results in the most fatal
reactions. A young German woman, the proprietor of what is considered a
successful "house" in the most notorious district in Chicago, traces her
career directly to a desperate attempt to conform to the standard of
"bringing home good wages" maintained by her numerous brothers and
sisters. One requirement of her home was rigid: all money earned by a
child must be paid into the family income until "legal age" was
attained. The slightly neurotic, very pretty girl of seventeen heartily
detested the dish-washing in a restaurant, which constituted her first
place in America, and quite honestly declared that the heavy lifting was
beyond her strength. Such insubordination was not tolerated at home, and
every Saturday night when her meager wages, reduced by sick days "off,"
were compared with what the others brought in, she was regularly
scolded, "sometimes slapped," by her parents, jeered at by her more
vigorous sisters and bullied by her brothers. She tried to shorten her
hours by doing "rush-work" as a waitress at noon, but she found this