A bunch of little young girls passed me, all laughing. They seemed years younger than I was. I thought of them--of the day they'd had in the factory--bad air, noise, work that was dead before it was born, and maybe a home where there was rows, or maybe just nobody at all; and somebody like Arthur Carney coming to help them be a little less lonesome. And then I faced it honest: Suppose he hadn't had flat hair and light eyes. Suppose he had looked different, so that I would have _wanted_ to go to dinner with him? I begun to walk fast, back to town. Across the bridge I went in a little down-stairs place to get something to eat. I was thinking so hard I never knew I'd ordered a quarter's worth till I got the bill. But I didn't care much. Everything else seemed all of a sudden to matter so much more. That night, when I walked into the meeting, they all stared. I s'pose the word had got round that I'd gone with him. I whispered to Rose that I wanted to say something, and she give me a chance right away. When I got up on the platform and faced 'em, I wasn't afraid. I was glad. I told them that just because I had got to leave, I didn't want them to think I was going to forget. And that they mustn't forget, either. "It ain't caught me yet," I told 'em. "I'm new and from the country, and I can see what it is that you're getting, like you can't see. And what I say is this: Quit your hoping. Just know that until we get together ourselves, nothing will come out of the factory except what we're getting now. Quit your hoping, and help. That's my last word." And yet I guess you can't blame anybody for being afraid of being hungry. I'd never been hungry yet, so I was brave. I didn't tell Mis' Bingy that night that I'd lost my job. I didn't tell her till next morning when she woke up, scared that I was late. We went out in the park with the baby. "We'll be all right, Mis' Bingy," I says, "don't you worry." I was sitting on the grass. And when I spoke so, I happened to see my foot sticking from under my skirt. The whole half of my shoe sole had come off, and was gone, and the nails was all showing. Ten days' rent it would take to buy me another pair. Just now I tore out thirty pages of this book. And just now I read them over. They made me sick to read them, not because of what was there, but because of what wasn't there. It was the same thing over and over again all that time. Hat factory, ribbon factory, braid factory, silk factory, and ten weeks rolling stogies. Some places the girls cared, and was trying to make others care to get things better. In others it was get what you could, look your best, and marry the first man that asked you. Every place I went, I begun asking about the things that Rose had taught me about--fines, and dockings, and fire safety, and the rest. Then I talked to the girls. That was why I didn't "last." "You'll get used to things one of these days," says a forelady to me. "That's what I'm afraid of," I told her.