“That piece of cloth over there—what’s the price of it?”
The saleswoman looked at the cloth, then back at me. Her expression was of a person who had answered the same question many times.
“There’s only five yards, and we can’t get any more like it,” she told me.
“Oh, it’s cheap enough,” and taking the cloth from the shelf she spread it before me on the counter. “One dollar for the piece. We could get three times the money if there was enough of it for anything. It’s only twenty-seven inches wide.”
On leaving that counter with the parcel in my hand I hurried to the pattern department and there spent twenty cents. Fortunately, among the riffraff left behind by Alice and the hat-trimmer there were remnants of several spools of white cotton thread and a few inches of dark-brown cotton poplin.
Early the next morning I trudged up to the Y. W. C. A. with all the spool cotton and the scrap of poplin in my bag, and a neatly folded parcel under my arm. When I quitted the sewing-room late that afternoon I carried with me a dress in which at that time it would have been equally appropriate to visit a tenement or dine in a palace. Besides being patriotic it was also the height of fashion—cotton khaki, severely tailored, with a long tie of dark brown.
Up to that time, aside from room-rent and food, my expenditures had been limited to one pair of shoes, seven dollars; one union suit, fifty-nine cents; one picture show, ten cents; two evenings at church, twenty-five cents in the plate each time. I admit that such an existence of grinding toil is only possible to a girl of character. Polly Preston is a girl of character. So also were a large majority of those with whom I had worked. Had such not been the case millions instead of thousands would have fallen by the wayside, succumbing to the conditions amid which women were forced to work before the entrance of our country into the World War. At that time the life of a working woman was of no more value than that of a dog. Yet had our working women ceased to be virtuous our country must have perished.
Now I have come to one of the two most disagreeable experiences of my four years. Perhaps the hardest for me to describe with equal justice to myself and the people among whom I worked.
