In the same way, in the course of her seasonal work, family responsibility pressed on Rita Karpovna.  She was a girl of nineteen, who had come to America a few years before with her older brother, Nikolai.  Together they were to earn their own living and make enough money to bring over their widowed mother, a little brother, and a sister a year or two younger than Rita.

Soon after she arrived, she found employment in finishing men’s vests, at $6 or $7 a week, for ten hours’ work a day.  Living and saving with her brother, she contrived to send home $4 a month.  Between them, Nikolai and Rita brought over their mother and the little brother.  But, very soon after they were all settled together, their mother died.  They were obliged to put the little brother into an institution.  Then Nikolai fell from a scaffolding and incapacitated himself, so that, after his partial recovery, his wage was sufficient only for his own support, near his work.

Rita now lived alone, spending $3.50 a month for a sleeping place in a tenement, and for suppers $1.25 a week.  Her luncheons and breakfasts, picked up anywhere at groceries or push carts, amounted, when she was working, to about 12 cents a day.  At other times she often went without both meals.  For in the last year her average wage had been reduced to $4.33 a week by over four months and a half of almost complete idleness.  Through nine weeks of this time she had an occasional day of work, and for nine weeks none at all.

When she was working, she paid 60 cents a week carfare, 25 cents a month to the Union, of which she was an enthusiastic member, and 10 cents a month to a “Woman’s Self-Education Society.”  The Union and this club meant more to Rita than the breakfasts and luncheons she dispensed with, and more, apparently, than dress, for which she had spent only $20 in a year and a half.

Some months afterward, Mrs. Clark received word that Rita had solved many of her difficulties by a happy marriage, and could hope that many of her domestic anxieties were relieved.

The chief of these, worry over the situation of her younger sister, still in Russia, had been enhanced by her observations of the unhappiness of a friend, another girl, working in the same shop—­a tragedy told here because of its very serious bearing on the question of seasonal work.  Rita’s younger sister was in somewhat the same position as this girl, alone, without physical strength for her work, and, indeed, so delicate that it was doubtful whether her admission to the United States could be secured, even if Rita could possibly save enough for her passage money.  The friend in the shop, hard pressed by the dull season, had at last become the mistress of a man who supported her until the time of the birth of their child, when he left her resourceless.  Slack and dull seasons in factory work must, of course, expose the women dependent on their wage-earning powers, most of them young and many of them with great beauty, to the greatest dangers and temptations.[21] Especially at the mercy of the seasons were some of the fur sewers, and the dressmakers, and milliners working, not independently, but in factories and workshops.