One night, early in January, she got into conversation with one of them as they left the factory. It was Sophie Switsky, a small, thin young woman of eighteen whose dark hair and eyes made almost too striking a contrast to her white face. "I go with you?" she had asked, looking up at Hertha as they went out into the rain, "I go under your umbrella?" Hertha had said "yes" eagerly, ashamed not to have offered shelter herself. Then, looking down at her companion's feet that were rapidly becoming soaked, she asked, smiling, "You didn't think it would rain when you left home this morning?" "No," Sophie answered, without the smile that is as much a part of the American greeting as a handshake. "I did not to forget. All the money I have I save for my brother in Lithuania to bring him here to me." "Yes?" "Then I must keep money for the summer when we shall have no work." "No work?" Hertha questioned. "Did you not know? This trade is very bad, very bad. In the winter we work like the slaves and in the summer no work. And before the work will stop we sit in the room and wait and wait to see if we will be needed for the day. Sometimes we sit for one week, two weeks, and only work a day; we cannot tell." "Why don't we work all the year through, but have shorter hours, and not speed?" Hertha asked. "The trade is like that," Sophie Switsky answered wisely. "People want everything the same time, made the same way. Then the fashions change, and people throw away all that they have and buy again." "How silly," Hertha thought to herself. The ways of trade seemed to her lacking not so much in humanity as in ordinary common sense. Their way lay along the same streets until they came almost to Hertha's door when they said good-night, Sophie refusing to allow her new acquaintance to go further. "It is nothing to get wet," she averred, "I used to it;" and she hurried on, mingling so swiftly with the crowd that thronged the Bowery that Hertha soon lost sight of her small figure. She felt attracted to this young Jewish girl, and yet she half feared that she, too, like Kathleen, had a vision, and she questioned whether she desired another friend who wished to change the world.