Page:The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909).djvu/95

 usefulness to your own sex, and increase your bank account.

Do not expect to defy every rule of hygiene—and sanitation, for many workrooms are unsanitary and germ-laden—and then achieve success and prosperity. Mix a little common sense with your ability to build good gowns, if you have no capital with which to open a shop which will appeal to wealthy customers, and you still wish to be your own mistress and paymaster, then you must specialize—and right here I want to picture some incidents from real dressmaking life in which girls have literally wrenched success from apparent failure by specializing, or creating a demand for their services.

In a city of less than thirty thousand inhabitants there works a young woman who calls herself dressmaker to little people. She makes garments of any sort for children over two and under ten. She would not make a shirt-waist for little Tommy's mother, nor a skirt for Baby Bess' grown-up sister, because she frankly admits that she does not know how. But she makes the cutest little brown-linen suits for Tommy in which he can play comfortably and yet look well dressed, because they fit properly; and she makes Baby Bess the cynosure of feminine eyes when she goes calling or to church with her proud mamma. Moreover, she is paid two dol-