And then when I am done, the waist is finished, and one of the little girls comes by to collect from my pile for sewing on the buttons and trimming the loose threads. Those little girls, they are only ten or eleven years old, and what do they know but working and working?

The day is almost over, and it is payday. Morris Jacobs makes a very bad day for me. Even before I ever lay eyes on him, he has a reputation as a mean boss to work for, always he is putting the clock back or stopping the hands, to steal time from the girls. He takes pennies from the week workers who are late to sit down at their machines because of the time it takes the freight elevators to carry them up, twenty at a time, to the ninth floor. I hear he is no good before I ever set foot in the door of the Triangle the first time, because of the stories about how he sided with the bosses during the big strike, harassing the picketers, hiring prostitutes to join the picket lines and stir things up.

But when we go to work there, he looks at me in the way a girl knows is trouble, trouble now or trouble some other time. I am tough. I can handle myself better than my sister, even though she is always saying of course she should be the one to be in charge. Maybe to impress me, in between the times of being mean, Jacobs is extra nice to me, so I am always guessing which is it now? Instead of taking from me two pennies because a finished waist had become soiled because it dropped on the dirty floor, he switches that waist into another pile of finished goods so one of the Italian girls is blamed and fined instead. But then another day he takes from me a dollar in his adding of my credit slips for the week, and he just shrugs it off. Another day he counts my stint too much and he touches my bosoms like we have made a deal. I take the money. I should have thrown it in his face and I am ashamed, but I want the money and I take it. I am a greenhorn and I have never been with a man except for Albert Fuchs, and he was a shy yeshiva boy who gives me a kiss on the boat when we are sailing into New York harbor and we see the Statue of Liberty and we are excited, and that is my first kiss, which isn’t so much. I wish I could be one of the little girls in the nursery so Jacobs would leave me alone.