Page:The Business of being a Woman by Ida Tarbell.djvu/174

 task. She knows the standards and conditions are a matter of chance; that, while she may receive considerate treatment in one place, in another there will be no apparent consciousness that she is a human being. She knows and dreads the loneliness of the average "place." "It's breaking my heart I was," sobbed an intelligent Irish girl, serving a term for drunkenness begun in the kitchen, "alone all day long with never a one to pass a good word." She finds herself cut off from most of the benefits which are provided for other wage-earning girls. She finds girls' clubhouses generally are closed to her. She is the pariah among workers.

What is there for this girl but the factory or the shop? Yet her presence there is a disaster for the whole labor system, for she is a cheap laborer—cheap not because she is a poor laborer—she is