“About twenty men and boys stay on a yacht anchored right out here.  They board on this boat, and go to their own boat when the whistle blows at ten o’clock,” she continued, leading me to the smoking-room, where she introduced a number of very young gentlemen reading magazines and knocking about gutturally together.  They, too, seemed proud of their position as boarders, proud of the Maverick Deep-Sea Hotel.  They were nice, boyish young fellows, who might have been young mechanicians.

She showed me the top deck with especial satisfaction as we came out into the fresh, rainy air.  The East River shipping and an empty recreation pier rose black on one side, with the water sparkling in jetted reflection between; and on the other quivered all the violet and silver lights of the city.  There were perhaps half a dozen tents pitched on deck.

“Some of the girls sleep outdoors up here,” said Miss McCray in her gentle voice.  “They like it so, they do it all winter long.  Have plenty of cover, and just sleep here in the tents.  Oh, we all like it!  Some of the men that were here first have married; and they like it so well, they keep coming back here with their wives to see us.  It’s so friendly,” said the girl, quietly; “and no matter how tired I am when I come here in the evening, I sit out on the deck, and I look at the water and the lights, and it seems as if all my cares float away.”

The good humor of the Maverick Deep-Sea Hotel, its rag-time, its boarders from the yacht, the charm of the row of tents with the girls in them sleeping their healthful sleep out in the midst of the river wind, the masts, the chimneys, stars, and city lights, all served to deepen the impression of the lack of normal pleasure in most of the shop-girls’ lives.

This starvation in pleasure, as well as low wages and overwork, subjects the women in the stores to a temptation readily conceivable.

The girls in the stores are importuned, not only by men from without these establishments, but also, to the shame of the managements, by men employed within the stores.

The constant close presence of this gulf has more than one painful aspect.  On account of it, not only the poor girls who fall suffer, but also the girls who have the constant sense of being “on guard,” and find it wise, for fear of the worst suspicion, to forego all sorts of normal delights and gayeties and youthful pleasures.  Many girls said, “I keep myself to myself”; “I don’t make friends in the stores very fast, because you can’t be sure what any one is like.”  This fear of friendship among contemporaries sharing the same fortune, fear, indeed, of the whole world, seemed the most cruel comment possible on the atmosphere of the girls’ lives in their occupation.

Another kind of meanness in human relations was abundantly witnessed by Miss Johnson, the League’s inquirer, who worked in one of the stores during the week of Christmas good-will.