Page:The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909).djvu/96

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lars a day, and has to fight for a month's vacation during hot weather.

Here was a girl who from childhood could set neat stitches and was accurate. She started to serve an apprenticeship with a dressmaker in her own city. She saw girls break down from close confinement in a poorly-ventilated workroom. She watched her employer's nerves quiver under the trials peculiar to dealing with women customers, and the effort to keep promises which never should have been made. The girl decided that she did not want to be a dressmaker, yet she had to earn her living.

She heard some mothers complaining of how poorly ready-to-wear clothes-for children were put together, and how tiresome it was to do your own sewing. The girl saw her chance and seized it. She offered her services at a dollar a day as a seamstress, working on children's clothes under the direction of the mothers who were glad to have a neat assistant. Then she read up on children's clothes. She bought patterns from various firms until she found one that specialized on raiment for children. She began to design a little frock here, a boy's blouse there. She studied as she sewed, and gradually she could ask a slight advance in her wages. In time mothers found that this girl, whom they had trained and whose faculty for absorbing information had been as rapid as it