Fanny was a pretty, fair girl, with a graceful presence, a wistful smile,
and the charm peculiar to blond Russians with long gray eyes. She looked,
however, painfully frail and white. In the factory she had worked for
four years, first at time work, then at piece-work. She could earn $7 a
week by stitching up and down the fronts and stitching on the belts of
108 corset covers--9 dozen a day. This was the most she could possibly
complete. The unremitting speeding and close attention this amount of
stitching required left her too exhausted at six o'clock to be able to
attend night school, or to learn English. She suffered greatly from
headache and from backache.
Fanny worked in this way for forty-one weeks of the year. For six weeks
she worked three days in the week. For two weeks the factory closed. For
three weeks she had been ill.
She was a girl of quick nervous intelligence, eager for life and with a
nice sense of quality. When she talked of her inability to go to night
school because of her frailness and weariness, tears flooded her eyes.
Her room was very nicely kept, and she had on a shelf a novel of
Sudermann's and a little book of Rosenthal's sweat shop verses.
Everything she wore was put on carefully and with good taste.
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