"Forty cents a dozen. Want to try it?"
"When may I go to work?"
"Right away. Write your name here."
Susan signed her name to what she saw at a glance was some sort
of contract. She knew it contained nothing to her advantage,
much to her disadvantage. But she did not care. She had to
have work--something, anything that would stop the waste of her
slender capital. And within fifteen minutes she was seated in
the midst of the sweating, almost nauseatingly odorous women of
all ages, was toiling away at the simple task of making an ugly
hat frame still more ugly by the addition of a bit of tawdry
cotton ribbon, a buckle, and a bunch of absurdly artificial
flowers. She was soon able to calculate roughly what she could
make in six days. She thought she could do two dozen of the
hats a day; and twelve dozen hats at forty cents the dozen
would mean four dollars and eighty cents a week!
Four dollars and eighty cents! Less than she had planned to
set aside for food alone, out of her ten dollars as a model.
Next her on the right sat a middle-aged woman, grossly fat,
repulsively shapeless, piteously homely--one of those luckless
human beings who are foredoomed from the outset never to know
any of the great joys of life the joys that come through our
power to attract our fellow-beings. As this woman stitched
away, squinting through the steel-framed spectacles set upon
her snub nose, Susan saw that she had not even good health to
mitigate her lot, for her color was pasty and on her dirty skin
lay blotches of dull red.
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