The "Imperial," to which Hertha went every morning, was a high-grade shop. The large room in which she spent forty-nine hours a week was as clean as a conscientious scrubwoman could make it; the ventilation was not bad, and few of the workers were obliged to use artificial light. At rare moments of interruption, when stopping to catch a bit of thread or to adjust a piece of trimming, Hertha would look about at her companions bent over their machines, one running a tuck here, another attaching the lace to the muslin there, and would marvel at their dexterity and at the speed with which the finished product came out ready to go to another room to be pressed. Later she might see it at a department store, thrown over a show figure, and priced at $5.65 or $3.95, according to the day of the week. They were pretty shirtwaists and she took a pride in her part in their production.

By January the trade became brisk. Orders for "Imperial" waists were shipped to-day to give place to new orders to be shipped to-morrow. The girls were paid by the piece, and were, for their own interest, likely to work as fast as they could; but foreman and manufacturer were continually calling for greater speed. The exigencies of the trade—capricious changes of style, a keen competition among the manufacturers—created a period of swift production to be followed by a period of unemployment. Now, in midwinter, work was speeded up; and, bending over each whirring machine, was a taut, tired girl whose one thought, if she thought at all, was of the signal that should come at last to tell her that this day's work was done.

Hertha never became accustomed to the daily speeding. Not only did her body rebel against it, but her spirit refused to accept its sacrilege. She had always enjoyed making clothes, seeing a garment grow under her fingers. No matter how simple the article might be at which she was at work, she had felt the satisfaction of the creator when the final stitch was taken and the parts had become a useful whole. But now nothing grew; everything was made artificially by a series of explosions as they made puffed rice. At her machine she ran row after row of small tucks, fashioning the shoulders to give fullness to the bust. It was a graceful pattern, but if she stopped a moment to think of it she lost money for her employer and for herself. Her mind must be concentrated on her machine and on the goods that she fed it with the constant suggestion of hurrying, and again hurrying, and under the accusing eye of the foreman hurrying yet again.

Among the few American girls who worked at the shop was one Annie Black, who lived in a suburb. Annie seemed always to be running to and from trains. Her life on the road bore a striking similarity to her life at her machine. She rushed in the morning to get the 6:59, which, if it were on time, got her in and at work by eight. By shortening her noon hour she could just catch the 5:51 train for home. But if the 6:59 was late, then it was futile to attempt to make up lost time and she must work until nearly six and take the 6:41 back to a late dinner. And as her trains moved so moved her machine with its girl engine driver impatient for each run to be over and done.

We all love to make things, and the tragedy of the modern factory is that it denies this joy to the worker. Within the great buildings that we see from the street car window or that we flash by on the railroad train, men and women are not fashioning shirtwaists or shoes or automobiles; they are not seeing one out of the million things of man's creation grow beneath their touch; they are performing a series of motions for which they receive remuneration. The swifter and more accurate the performance of these motions the better the pay; but of the finished product they have neither knowledge nor thought. At ten years of age, with needle or wheel, they are better, more intelligent creators than at thirty, when, with fagged brain, they mechanically add their part to the multitude of parts that make up the factory product. At ten they take joy in the thing they have made and may sell it for a nickel or a kiss; at thirty they have but one desire, to dispose of their part of the product as dearly as they can. For, as they have no part in the creation of the whole, so they have no share in the intricate ways of business that make possible the factory's life. They are only tools like the machines they operate, to be used by the few, the creators, who, like the gods themselves, conceive and command.

At the Imperial shop most of the girls were Jewish. Annie Black and half a dozen other young Americans sat by themselves at a north window and when luncheon time came rehearsed the very lively happenings of the night before over their indigestible food; but the other girls were Russian Jews and spoke in Yiddish. Hertha was glad to have been seated with the latter group, for from the first she liked them better than her compatriots. Her shyness, coupled with her dislike of the vulgar, kept her from making any acquaintances among the American girls, but she sometimes regretted that the barrier of language separated her from the Jewish. Some of them were, to be sure, foolish and vain, but the majority were serious, and a few appealed to her sense both of decorum and beauty. These girls had broad foreheads and wore their dark hair parted and drawn down over the upper part of their ears. Their deep brown eyes had long curling lashes. They carried serious looking books to and from their work. She often wondered what they were talking about when they got together at luncheon, and she always smiled when she passed them to go out at noon.

One night, early in January, she got into conversation with one of them as they left the factory. It was Sophie Switsky, a small, thin young woman of eighteen whose dark hair and eyes made almost too striking a contrast to her white face. "I go with you?" she had asked, looking up at Hertha as they went out into the rain, "I go under your umbrella?" Hertha had said "yes" eagerly, ashamed not to have offered shelter herself. Then, looking down at her companion's feet that were rapidly becoming soaked, she asked, smiling, "You didn't think it would rain when you left home this morning?"

"No," Sophie answered, without the smile that is as much a part of the American greeting as a handshake. "I did not to forget. All the money I have I save for my brother in Lithuania to bring him here to me."

"Yes?"

"Then I must keep money for the summer when we shall have no work."

"No work?" Hertha questioned.

"Did you not know? This trade is very bad, very bad. In the winter we work like the slaves and in the summer no work. And before the work will stop we sit in the room and wait and wait to see if we will be needed for the day. Sometimes we sit for one week, two weeks, and only work a day; we cannot tell."

"Why don't we work all the year through, but have shorter hours, and not speed?" Hertha asked.

"The trade is like that," Sophie Switsky answered wisely. "People want everything the same time, made the same way. Then the fashions change, and people throw away all that they have and buy again."

"How silly," Hertha thought to herself. The ways of trade seemed to her lacking not so much in humanity as in ordinary common sense.

Their way lay along the same streets until they came almost to Hertha's door when they said good-night, Sophie refusing to allow her new acquaintance to go further. "It is nothing to get wet," she averred, "I used to it;" and she hurried on, mingling so swiftly with the crowd that thronged the Bowery that Hertha soon lost sight of her small figure. She felt attracted to this young Jewish girl, and yet she half feared that she, too, like Kathleen, had a vision, and she questioned whether she desired another friend who wished to change the world.

And yet, when she had finished a supper alone and had dropped wearily into a chair by the lamp, she found she was almost ready for a world-change herself. She was too tired to care to read, too tired for coherent thought. In her head buzzed and hummed and roared the machines of the shop and every now and then her whole body twitched convulsively. Outside the rain beat steadily upon the pavement. It was a night like this, she remembered, that she had been carried, a little new-born baby, and placed on mammy's big bed. Who did such a thing? Not her young mother who had died so soon after her birth. Not her grandfather who in the end had given her his name. Was it her mother's mother who had tried to hide the family shame? She shrewdly suspected so. Well, she had not succeeded, for here was Hertha Ogilvie, after all. It was not so easy to hide a white child, not so easy to stifle the spirit of remorse.

As she sat in her chair, her eyes half closed, she found her thoughts, as so often happened, drifting back to her home among the pines, to the cabin with the white sand at the doorway and the red roses clambering over the porch. Instead of coming home to this empty flat, Ellen and her mother and Tom were on hand to welcome her. They helped take off her things, they dried her shoes, they gave her hot coffee to drink. Was it foolish to have gone away to enter the life of this ruthless city that held you in a mad whirl of work for half the year and for the other half left you to starve; this city in which there was no time for a pleasant homecoming and an evening meal together; this city in which you met a friendly face and lost it again in the great crowds that swarmed in millions over the miles of narrow streets? Her head drooped as though nodding yes to her questions, and her eyes wholly closed.

But just then the doorbell rang.