Making Both Ends Meet | Page 9

chilling air so subtly
imparted by the altruistic act of furnishing for others--the air that
characterizes spare rooms, hotel parlors, and great numbers of
settlement receiving rooms.
"I had always wanted to come to America," she said in her quick
English enunciation. "And I saved something and borrowed ten pounds

of my brother, and came. Oh, it was hard the first part of the time I was
here. I remember, when I first came in at the door of this house, and
registered, one of the other shop-girls here was standing at the desk. I
had on a heavy winter coat, just a plain, rough-looking coat, but it's
warm. That girl gave me such a look, a sort of sneering look--oh, it
made me hot! But that's the way American shop-girls are. I never have
spoken to that girl.
"I got down to 50 cents before I had a job. There was one store I didn't
want to go to. It was cheap, and had a mean name. One afternoon,
when it was cold and dark, I walked up to it at last; and it looked so
horrid I couldn't go in. There was another cheap store just beyond it,
and another. All the shoppers were hurrying along. Oh, it was a terrible
time that afternoon, terrible, standing there, looking at those big, cheap
New York stores all around me.
"But at last I went in, and they took me on. It wasn't so bad, after all. In
about two months I had a chance to go to a better store. I like it pretty
well. But I can't save anything. I had $8 a week. Now I have $9. I pay
$4.50 a week here for board and lodging, but I always live up to my
salary, spending it for clothes and washing. Oh, I worry and worry
about money. But I've paid back my $50. I have a nice silk dress now,
and a new hat. And now I've got them," she added, with a laugh, "I
haven't got anywhere to wear them to. I look forward to Sunday
through the week days; but when Sunday comes, I like Monday best.
"Though I think it doesn't make much difference how you do in the
store about being promoted. A girl next me who doesn't sell half as
much as I do gets $12 where I have $9; and the commission we have on
sales in Christmas week wasn't given to me fairly. The store is kind in
many ways, and lets the girls sit down every minute when customers
aren't there, and has evening classes and club-rooms. But yet the girls
are discouraged about not having promotions fairly and not having
commissions straight. Right is right."[4]
The charmlessness of existence noticeable in most of the working girls'
homes was emphasized by a saleswoman in the china department of a
Broadway department store, Kate McCray, a pretty young Irishwoman

of about twenty-three, who was visited in a hotel she said she didn't like
to mention to people, for fear they would think it was queer. "You see,
it's a boat, a liner that a gentleman that has a large plantation gave for a
hotel for working girls. It seems peculiar to some people for a girl to be
living on the river."
Miss McCray paid $3.50 a week board at the Maverick Deep-Sea Hotel.
Her salary was $8 a week. She had been in the same department for
four years, and considered it wrong that she received no promotion. She
could save nothing, as she did none of her own washing on account of
its inroads of fatigue, and she was obliged to dress well. She was,
however, in excellent health and especially praised the store's policy of
advising the girls to sit down and to rest whenever no customers were
present.
It was misty and raining on the occasion of my visit to the Maverick
Deep-Sea Hotel, a liner anchored in the East River; and Miss McCray
conducted me into the cabin to a large party of boys, elderly women,
and children, most of them visitors like myself, and all listening to a
powerful-wristed youth happily playing, "You'll Come Back and Hang
Around," with heavily accented rag-time, on an upright piano.
"About seventy girls board on this boat. That young lady going into the
pantry now is a stenographer--such a bright girl."
Absorbed in the spectacle of a hotel freedom which permitted a guest to
go to a pantry at will, whatever the force of her brightness, I followed
Miss McCray about the boat. It was as if the hotel belonged to the girls,
while in the Christian homes it had been as if everything belonged, not
to the girls, but to benevolent though carefully possessive Christians.
Miss McCray praised