administered. Many a girl who complains of loneliness, and who
relinquishes her situation with that as her sole excuse, feebly tries to
formulate her sense of restraint and social mal-adjustment. She
sometimes says that she "feels so unnatural all the time." The writer
has known the voice of a girl to change so much during three weeks of
"service" that she could not recognize it when the girl returned to her
home. It alternated between the high falsetto in which a shy child
"speaks a piece" and the husky gulp with which the _globus hystericus_
is swallowed. The alertness and _bonhomie_ of the voice of the
tenement-house child had totally disappeared. When such a girl leaves
her employer, her reasons are often incoherent and totally
incomprehensible to that good lady, who naturally concludes that she
wishes to get away from the work and back to her dances and giddy life,
content, if she has these, to stand many hours in an insanitary factory.
The charge of the employer is only half a truth. These dances may be the
only organized form of social life which the disheartened employee is
able to mention, but the girl herself, in her discontent and her moving
from place to place, is blindly striving to respond to a larger social
life. Her employer thinks that she should be able to consider only the
interests and conveniences of her employer's family, because the
employer herself is holding to a family outlook, and refuses to allow
her mind to take in the larger aspects of the situation.

Although this household industry survives in the midst of the factory
system, it must, of course, constantly compete with it. Women with
little children, or those with invalids depending upon them, cannot
enter either occupation, and they are practically confined to the sewing
trades; but to all other untrained women seeking employment a choice is
open between these two forms of labor.