Many of them enter stores as mere children in the capacity of cash girls. They are the children of poor parents, and as they grow up to young maidenhood, they acquire a sort of superficial polish in the store, and are brightened without being educated. Some grow up and take their places as full-blown salesladies, and begin to sigh for the gayety of the streets, for freedom from restraint, and for amusements that are not within their reach. Naturally _au fait_ in style, with taste and clever fingers, they dress in an attractive manner, with the hope of beguiling the ideal hero they have constructed from the pages of the trashy story paper. It is a sort of voluntary species of sacrifice on their part--a kind of suicidal decking with flowers, and making preparation for immolation. Full of pernicious sentimentality, they are open to the first promising flirtation. They see elegantly-dressed and diamonded ladies, and their imagination is fed from the fountains of vulgar literature until they dream that they, too, are destined to be won by some splendid cavalier of fabulous wealth. Learning from the wishy-washy literature that their face is their fortune, and so, reading what happened to others, and how perfectly lovely and romantic it all was, they are ready for the wiles of the first gay deceiver. Waiting in vain for their god-like ideal, they are finally content to look a little lower, and favorably receive the immodest addresses of some clerk in their own store, or succeed in making a street "mash." Sometimes the pretty girl rushes impetuously into marriage, repents and separates from her husband. She is still good looking, and her marital experience has given her an air of easy assurance, and she readily finds employment as a saleslady. Her influence afterwards, among girls comparatively innocent and without her experience, cannot but be pernicious, and at the same time must exert a certain formative and shaping process in determing the peculiar character of the whole class of girls in the store.