"I don't say it's your fault," she said, "but he's started about you, and it's for your own good I tell you to go. The best thing for you is to go back to your mother, or else take a place with some nice woman that'll keep an eye to you. You'll always be run after. I know your kind, that no man looks at without wanting to fool with 'em. You take my advice and go into a place." The chance came that night. The mistress of a cheap boarding-house in East Broadway, her patrons chiefly young clerks from Grand and Division Street stores, offered her home and eight dollars a month, and Lizzie, who by this time was frightened and discouraged, accepted on the instant. She was well accustomed to long hours, and she had never minded standing as many of the girls did, her apprenticeship in the mill having made it comparatively easy. But the drudgery undergone here was beyond anything her life had ever known. Her day began at five and it never ended before eleven. She slept on an old mattress on the kitchen floor, and as her strength failed from the incessant labor, lost all power of protest and accepted each new demand as something against which there could be no revolt. There was abundance of coarse food and thus much advantage, but she had no knowledge that taught her how to make work easier, nor had her mistress any thought of training her. She was a dish-washing machine chiefly, and broke and chipped even the rough ware that formed the table furniture, till the exasperated mistress threatened to turn her off if another piece were destroyed. It was a case of hopeless inaptitude; and when in early spring she sickened, and the physician grudgingly called in declared it a case of typhus brought on by the conditions in which she had lived, she was sent at once to the hospital and left to such fate as might come. A clean bed, rest, and attendance seemed a heaven to the girl when consciousness came back, and she shrank from any thought of going out again to the fight for existence. "I don't know what the matter is," she said to the doctor as she mended, "but somehow I ain't fit to make a living. I shall have to go back to the mill, but I said I never would do that." "You shall go to some training-school and be taught," said the doctor, who had stood looking at her speculatively yet pitifully. "Ah, but I couldn't learn. Somehow things don't stick to me. I'm not fit to earn a living." "You're of the same stuff as a good many thousand of your kind," the doctor said under his breath, and turned away with a sigh.