“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 highly the manager and his wife.