Page:Chernyshevsky.whatistobedone.djvu/197

Rh which might have been expected: in the very first month of their regime the girls decided that it would not do for Viéra Pavlovna to work without pay. When they announced this decision to her, she said that they were right. They wanted to give her the third part of the profits; she laid it aside for some time before she ventured to explain to them that it was diametrically opposed to the fundamental idea of their scheme. For some time they could not understand this; then afterwards they came to the conclusion that Viéra Pavlovna refused a special share of the profits, not from self-conceit, but from the nature of the experiment itself. By this time the shop had expanded to such dimensions that Viéra Pavlovna by herself was not able to attend to all the cutting, and so she had to get an assistant. They gave Viéra Pavlovna the same wages as the other cutter. The money which she had been laying aside was now, by her request, taken back into the common fund, with the exception of what was due her for her work as cutter; the balance was employed in the establishment of a bank. For about a year Viéra Pavlovna spent the larger part of each day at the shop, and really worked as hard as any one else, according to the schedule of hours. When she saw the possibility of spending less time in the shop than a whole day, her wages were reduced in proportion.

How should the profits be divided? Viéra Pavlovna wanted to bring it about that the profits should be divided equally among them all. They consented to this only towards the middle of the third year; before that time they tried several different schemes. At first they divided the profits proportionally according to the wages earned by each; then they came to the conclusion that if a girl missed work for a few days on account of illness or any other important reason, it would not be fair to reduce her share of the division money, which, properly speaking, had not been gained during those few days, but by the general course of the work and the general state of the shop. Then they went a step further, and agreed that the cutters and other girls who received extra wages, by delivering orders and other duties, were already sufficiently paid by their extra wages, and that therefore it would be unfair for them to get proportionally more than the others also in their share of the profits. The ordinary seamstresses who had no extra duties were so modest that they did not ask for any charge, although they saw the