However, the season had lasted only three or three and a half months at a time, from February 1 to May 15, and from August 18 to December 4.  During the six busy weeks in the spring and the autumn, while the orders were piling up, work was carried on with feverish intensity.  The working day lasted from eight-thirty until six, with an hour at noon for luncheon.  Many employees, however, stayed until nine o’clock, receiving $1, besides 30 cents supper money, for overtime.  But by six o’clock Frances was so exhausted that she could do no more, and she always went home at that hour.

In addition to her thirty weeks in the Fifth Avenue order establishment, Frances had two weeks’ work in a wholesale house, where the season began earlier; so that she had been employed for thirty-two weeks in the year, and idle for twenty.  She was a piece-worker and she had earned from $8 to $14 a week.

The twenty idle weeks had been filled with continuous futile attempts to find anything to do.  Application at department stores had been ineffectual, so had answered advertisements.  She said she had lost all scruples about lying, because, the moment it was known that she wanted a place during the dull season only, she had no chance at all.

Frances lived in one of the pleasantest and most expensive subsidized homes for working girls, paying for board, and a large, delightful room shared with two other girls, $4.50 a week.  Although she walked sometimes from work, carfare usually amounted to 50 cents a week.  Laundering two sets of underwear and one white waist a week cost 60 cents.  Thus, for a reasonable degree of cleanliness and comfort, partly provided by philanthropic persons, she spent $5.60 a week aside from the cost of clothing.

She dressed plainly, though everything she had was of nice quality.  She said she could spend nothing for pleasure, because of her constant foreboding of the dull season, and the necessity of always saving for her apparently inevitable weeks of idleness.  She was, at the time she gave her account, extremely anxious because she did not know how she was to pay another week’s board.

Yet she had excellent training and skill, the advantage of living comfortably and being well nourished, and the advantage of a considerate employer, who did as well as she could for her workers, under the circumstances.

Something, then, must be said about these circumstances—­this widespread precariousness in work, against which no amount of thrift or industriousness or foresight can adequately provide.  Where industry acts the part of the grasshopper in the fable, it is clearly quite hopeless for workers to attempt to attain the history of the ant.  Among the factory workers, the waist makers’ admirable efforts for juster wages were, as far as yearly income was concerned, largely ineffectual, on account of this obstacle of slack and dull seasons, whose occurrence employers are as powerless as employees to forestall.