Page:The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909).djvu/196

 she met going to and from work, in lunch hours and at the settlement house where she spent her evenings. She grew to hate the factory and determined to become a stenographer. By day she worked at her old task of making boxes; by night she studied English. And always she saved every penny, until she could leave the factory and enter a business college, where she studied like the personification of concentration. It was a laudable ambition, but no one told her what the poor girl did not realize—that stenography cannot be built on a faulty education, and this girl had not been educated in either her own language or in English. She mastered stenography, but her knowledge of English remained defective. She could secure no position.

She went back to the school for more instruction in English. Her funds ran low. Her relatives, whose daughters were doing well in the factories, felt no sympathy for her and refused financial aid. Charitable women helped her in the matter of clothes and incidental expenses, but no one asked her how she was living. The truth was that she was very nearly starving. And when at last she mastered English and was eligible for a position as stenographer at seven or eight dollars a week, she was so broken in health and nerves that she was mentally unfit to cope with the petty annoyances of office life.